“Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the very first issue of the photography journal Sovetskoe Foto, published that same year. In fact, such amateur photographic practice—as Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko make clear in their book In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos—was a key form of active Soviet citizenship. A photographer’s manual published in 1931 openly ordered all to turn their cameras away from family, friends, and other mundane subjects and demanded, “Not one photograph devoid of social significance!”
As a scholar of photography, I appreciate anyone’s recognition of the power of photography. As a social scientist, I read the manual’s call to action as a statement of the obvious. Indeed, no photograph, Soviet or not—even (or perhaps, especially) that of friends, family, or other mundane subjects—is “devoid of social significance.” What people choose to photograph or put in family albums is itself socially significant. For “who we are,” “who we spend time with,” “what is considered mundane” are some of the fundamental questions of social analysis. Hence, the importance of looking at family albums.
Many scholars have underscored the paradox of family photo albums being, on the one hand, cherished objects, and, yet, also full of banal images with often predictable themes shared across cultures.1 To all but social scientists—and even to them at times—viewing other people’s family albums is a form of torture; we simply do not know any of the people in the pictures and, without knowing them, we do not care.
In Visible Presence shows us that Soviet family album owners themselves also encountered strangers in their photo albums. The appearance of strangers within family photo albums was part of how a Soviet imagined and imaged community was constructed and sustained.
Perhaps nothing exemplifies this familial focus on strangers as remarkably as the genre of group portraits. In many such photographs—like the one documenting a visit to Moscow’s Red Square, reproduced below—the individuals in the “group portrait” did not actually know one another. The individuals are not a collective traveling together, but, rather, merely all those who the thrifty street photographer in Red Square could fit into a single frame. Once he developed it, the photographer would send a copy of the photograph to addresses left behind by each of the subjects.
The very same portrait could become a cherished item in many domestic photography collections across the vast geography of the Soviet Union. And, today, that same photograph would appear in the family albums of diverse individuals, who may share nothing other than once having been Soviet and partaking in the quintessential Soviet ritual of posing for a group photograph in Red Square.
In their interviews in six different Russian cities centered on more than 50 family photography collections, Sarkisova and Shevchenko found that these collections incorporated multitudes of others who were neither kin nor friends. Hence this is a study of domestic photography in the sense that it is a study conducted in domestic spaces around collections held in homes but—in striking contrast to other studies of family photography conducted elsewhere—not limited to photographs of domestic spaces or their inhabitants.
Sarkisova and Shevchenko are committed to studying the Soviet past through photography and they do a phenomenal job showing the central role of photography in both constructing Sovietness in the past and accessing it in the post-Soviet present. Despite the fact that we continue to see many books published on “photography” at large, I tend to agree with John Tagg’s statement that
Photography as such has no identity. Its status as a technology varies with the power relations which invest it. Its nature as a practice depends on the institutions and agents which define it and set it to work. Its function as a mode of cultural production is tied to definite conditions of existence, and its products are meaningful and legible only within the particular currencies they have. Its history has no unity. It is a flickering across a field of institutional spaces. It is this field we must study, not photography as such.
Sarkisova and Shevchenko capture the field of institutional spaces that make Soviet photography particularly noteworthy.
One way of reading In Visible Presence is as the Russia chapter of a field guide to Soviet domestic photography (the authors are well aware that their findings represent one Soviet republic among many). But it is so much more than that. This book models what is possible. Simply put, this is one of the most important books I’ve encountered in my life as a scholar. The book does nothing short of offering us a new form of scholarly vision: We are shown images from multiple collections not to follow likeness or resemblance across albums or over time, but, rather, to recognize for ourselves broader social and political patterns. Indeed, I predict that In Visible Presence will immediately become a reference and should serve as a model for much work on photography in the future….
https://www.publicbooks.org/strangers-in-the-family-album-reflections-on-soviet-amateur-photography/
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Reading Vasily Grossman’s ‘Stalingrad’ and ‘Life and Fate’
March 8, 1917: February Revolution begins in Russia
The Gulag Archipelago: An Epic of True Evil
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: Historian of Decline and Prophet of Revival. By Madhavan Palat
The Grand Inquisitor and the Holy Fool: Madhavan Palat’s lecture on Dostoevsky
After the truth-shower 