Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography

Summary

“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 w...