#soviet archives

[vasilinaorlova]

Margarita Terekhova and Mikhail Boyarsky I can't help but love them as a part of my childhood. Soviet cinema

[vasilinaorlova]

Фотография Евтушенко в музее Истории Братскгэсстроя / Photo of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the History Museum of Bratskgesstroy

[vasilinaorlova]

my great grandfather Vassily Zuev.

a place where the photo was taken is supposedly the town of Ust Uda, Eastern Siberia. the photo was taken for the documents, before the WWII (circa 1937, my father assesses). this picture was found by my father in one of the relatives’ family albums / archives

#photography

[vasilinaorlova]

My father is on the right, with a military belt, look at the star buckle. Boys are wearing valenki (felt boots). The village of Yandy, near the Angara river (Siberia). In 1961, the village was inundated because of the Bratsk dam's construction. The neighborhood is called Yelnick Папа крайний справа, препоясан военным ремнем, посмотрите на звезду на пряжке. На мальчиках валенки. Поселок Янды на Ангаре, затопленный в 1961 году в связи со строительством Братской ГЭС. Район называется Ельник

[vasilinaorlova]

in the Soviet times, as you know, there was a newspaper titled “Pravda” (Truth). even in my childhood, the Orwellian taste in it was undeniable (long before I read Orwell) in the modern Russian times, there is a newspaper titled “Argumenty i fakty” (Arguments and Facts, in this very order). just as well as text cannot contain “truth” if only it becomes “truth” when it is written, published, circulated, “fact” is not something accessible by means of text–all we have is interpretation and “arguments” dangle there, in the void, without any “thesis” to support or disprove yet it is clear where it came from–supposedly tired from the overwhelming ubiquity of propaganda, which is arguably always a “lie” (or, at least, construction, simulacra, and orchestrated hallucination), new publishers and the emergent public demanded none of it but pure “arguments and facts”

Update: my harmonious theory needs to be readjusted, Argumenty i fakty existed in the late Soviet times

[vasilinaorlova]

Soviet Photography: Family Archive. 1

In the dark bathroom, transmutations happened. My father closed the door. In the red magic light of the lamp, images appeared in the white parallelograms of paper put into the reactive liquid. A smiling face of my brother emerged out of nothingness. Then, images were placed on a string across the kitchen, fastened with variegated clothespins. The photographs had to dry out. And it seemed, that just like the images emerged in the sheets, to remain forever in our memory, they would fade out, slip into oblivion, with our, their viewers, disappearance. Photography was an everyday magic. An alchemy, a transfiguration of forms. Pictures belonged to history if only because things were mercilessly stripped from their color. Pure shapes remained. The geometry of bare form. Shadows, lights, and everything falling in between, in the territory of uncertainty, sculpted the world.

[vasilinaorlova]

Soviet Photography: Family Archive. 2

Film, and, later, digital point-and-shoot cameras which are called in Russia, shrewdly, “soap dishes” (mylnitsi), produced soapy, blurred, opaque pictures. Their autofocus, automatic exposure, and flash either embedded into the corpus of the thing, or opening with a click, did not allow for a good quality of the photo. Still, point-and-shoot cameras were a technological leap from much more complex single- or double-lens reflex cameras, the most accessible apparatuses of the previous generation. The new soap dishes required no technical knowledge--simply press the button, and then order prints. The photography proliferated at great speed, and the dreaded entertainment of being a guest in a friend’s house become “let me show you “photolets” (photochki--diminutive)”. Oh the boredom of going through someone’s blurry archive, consisting of poor shapshots: parties, drinking in the dark on a park bench, near the sea, landmarks of the travels, or worse yet, if someone imagined themselves a photographer, pictures of railroads, bridges, and other industrial and architectural objects taken from sudden angles. Boredom enveloped the viewer, who harbored her own treasures in several plastic albums, of skimming which no guest was spared.

Often in the photographs snapped at point-and-shoot cameras, yellow numbers in the right low corner indicated the date. As it was somewhat tricky or at least required some attention, unlike the action of pressing the button, which required none, the date was set incorrectly. And in the photos taken in 2003, 2013 would appear, to mislead the future archaeologists of the everydayness.

In every Russian house, unless its inhabitants were born after the onslaught of the mobile phones with cameras, there are innumerable archives of pictures taken on soap-dishes--depicting by the very least the parents of today’s toddlers, who are so skillful in managing iPads they attempt to screentouch objects of the outside, arguably non-virtual, world--dogs, trees, toy cars. 

[vasilinaorlova]

covertly arousing. regardless of whether this particular example is true (seems like it), old Soviet newspapers--I spent quite a number of hours perusing them--are full of enticing undertones and are clandestinely exciting, particularly in the instances of policing of the female body. time and again they cantankerously demand an unheard-of purity from a woman, ask for absolute innocence and fleshlessness, and praise those who achieve it with the tacit eloquence of satisfied approval. I have examples collected somewhere... the demand for purity as the uncompromising prurience of kinds. "obscenity of propaganda"