Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography
The appearance of strangers within family photo albums was part of how a Soviet imagined and imaged community was constructed and sustained. “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