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 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. 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.
Beyond the excellent chapter on Soviet tourist photography, “Spaces of Belonging,” Sarkisova and Shevchenko carefully show how the use of visual technologies to portray a vast geography as cohesive Soviet space is not reserved for cinematic masters such as Dziga Vertov in his “A Sixth Part of the World” (1926), but is rather ubiquitous in humble domestic photography collections. In Sarkisova and Shevchenko’s mature hands, this exploration of domestic photography is also an ethnography of everyday repressions, a topic that concerns a growing number of populations worldwide—indeed recent decades prove no one can afford to feel confident that any political progress is permanent.
“The meaning of a photograph as material object is continuously transformed.” Hence they made ideal raw material for initiatives of various ideological leanings that encourage post-Soviet generations to access the past through family photographs. In the Soviet era, “every chance photograph had the potential of becoming a compromising piece of ‘evidence’”; meanwhile, in the post-Soviet period, many seem committed to the belief in photography’s potential to reveal their truth about the past.
The interviews with families at the heart of In Visible Presence were conducted between 2006–2008, when many shared stories they had long kept hidden from even their family members. Luckily for us as readers, Sarkisova and Shevchenko were able to gain the trust of their interlocutors even during the span of a few hours, for in the second part of the book they are able to show that “silence is a constant companion in conversations about photography.” Furthermore, they investigate different forms of silence. Specifically, these interviews were conducted at a time when one generation felt just barely able to admit that they had been scared into silence in the past while a post-Soviet had not yet been schooled in what kinds of speech is permissible in a repressive state.
It is by brilliantly mining domestic photo collections for material marks of censorship and listening for silences in life narratives that the researchers were able to trace not just intergenerational transmission but also nontransmission: “While silence presupposes an element of self-awareness and a recognition of absence, oblivion suggests a silence that does not know its name—an absence so thoroughly naturalized that it becomes unnoticed and, by extension, unlamentable.” Sarkisova and Shevchenko’s deft analysis shows us both silence and oblivion.
As soon as you hold this volume in your hands, even before you’ve opened the cover, something signals that this scholarly book is extraordinary. “A ribbon marker has a purpose: it shows you a way to read a book,” I’m told by Mindell Dubansky, head of the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation at the Watson Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Indeed, I’ve looked through all my bookshelves and I can find no other scholarly book with a ribbon marker sewn into the binding. They are typically associated with personal books like journals or yearbooks. In Visible Presence too is a personal book, a book to return to, a book where you will want to mark your place for you can follow many pathways through it. Ribbon markers were popular in the 18th and 19th centuries and were commonly used in prayer books or “books that one expects to be using frequently,” Dubansky reminds us. MIT press is to be congratulated for understanding that the 250 photographs in the book are absolutely necessary, for designing it in a way that enables readers to meaningfully engage with the images and not just glance at them, and for including the ribbon marker. Once you open the volume and learn that it is about seeing Soviet pasts through family photos, the ribbon marker becomes an invitation to look anew each time you return to the book.
As I write this review, I notice that another kind of book on my shelf that occasionally has a ribbon marker are certain reference books and indeed I will be using this volume as a research guide on photography for myself and my students. The volume of photographs enables the authors to both follow the sociological and anthropological convention of anonymizing research participants and include photographs of many individuals, illuminating widespread patterns. The ribbon marker comes in handy to mark one’s place in the text while reviewing the entire collection of images to better understand a point.
MIT Press is also to be commended for designing the book around not just many photographs, but, also, stills from videos of the interviews. Hence, by the end of In Visible Presence readers conceptually understand modes of silences and have actually been taught visually what they look like and how to recognize them in other contexts. It is this element that makes the book invaluable for anyone undertaking social research whether or not it has anything to do with photography. Sarkisova and Shevchenko write explicitly about research design choices, methodologies and their consequences.
This book is nothing less than a gift, a domestic album prepared by Sarkisova and Shevchenko that other scholars and students can consult and find rich and instructive precisely because it is not didactic. The sheer volume of examples allows for the construction of strong visual arguments without the often unconvincing stern voice of expertise that often accompanies books relying on an example it orders us to believe is paradigmatic.
What “In Visible Presence” shows us is that images do not sit still, nor do they obey the social directives about who or how we are allowed or encouraged to remember
Here is where I must confess that I have known of the research that led to In Visible Presence since 2010. I mention this not only for the sake of transparency, but because this is how I witnessed firsthand their decisions to continue their research beyond 2008, even when they had finished the bulk of family interviews. A decade ago, they could have already published a good book analyzing the Soviet past through domestic family albums. They could have congratulated themselves on knowing precisely when this research was possible and not missing the window of opportunity. Instead, by continuing to return to their interviews and their analysis—and doing further research when they sensed shifts in the stakes of remembering particular Soviet histories in contemporary Russia—they have produced not just a good book, but a great one.
This determination was not one dramatic decision, but, rather, a consequence of being open as scholars and attuned to political changes in Russia. “Over the past decades, we saw the Russian political structure ossify and turn to the narratives of imperial grandeur as a source of self- legitimation,” Sarkisova and Shevchenko observe, “silencing or obstructing all perspectives advocating for a critical engagement with the past. With the elimination of independent oppositional voices in the public sphere, the energy of care and mourning channeled by family photographs has become increasingly harnessed by the state.”
While In Visible Presence documents that there are no guarantees that a period in which people feel they need no longer be silent will not be followed by a repressive one, it ends on a hopeful note—at least for the political uses of photography. After all, “family snapshots continue to exceed the narrowly instrumental expectations imposed on them,” and each photograph “contains an invitation to engage in a way that cannot be fully predetermined. In no small part, this is because the photograph lingers.” As readers, then, we are all fortunate that Sarkisova and Shevchenko accepted this “invitation” and extended it to others, that they shared their looking practices with us and lingered on their research. In Visible Presence should be read not only by scholars interested in photography, but by anyone interested in how history is made to serve a political purpose in the present; which is to say, by everyone.
The book’s poignant Coda begins with a saying commonly inscribed on photographs: “Look at my still image and remember.” What In Visible Presence shows us is that images do not sit still, nor do they obey the social directives about who or how we are allowed or encouraged to remember. They linger, like you will, with this extraordinary work of social analysis in your hands.