In Visible Presence

An absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past.

A faded image of a family gathered at a festively served dinner table, raising their glasses in unison. A group of small children, sitting in orderly rows, with stuffed toys at their feet and a portrait of Lenin looming over their heads. A pensive older woman against a snowy landscape, her gaze directed lovingly at a tombstone. These are a few of the evocative images in In Visible Presence by Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko, an exquisitely researched book that brings together photographs from Soviet-era family photo archives and investigates their afterlives in Russia.

In Visible Presence explores the photographic images’ singular power to capture a fleeting moment by approaching them as points of contestation and possibility. Drawing on over a decade of fieldwork and interviews, as well as internet ethnography, media analysis, and case studies, In Visible Presence offers a rich account of the role of family photography in creating communities of affect, enabling nostalgic longings, and processing memories of suffering, violence, and hardship. Together these photos evoke youthful aspirations, dashed hopes, and moral compromises, as well as the long legacy of silence that was passed down from grandparents to parents to children.

With more than 250 black and white photos, In Visible Presence is an astonishing journey into domestic photography, family memory, and the ongoing debate over the meaning of the Soviet past that is as timely and powerful today as it has ever been.Preface (xi)
Introduction (xiii)
Part I: The Soviet Past in the Domestic Archive
1 Time to Choose Your Past (3)
2 Do-It-Yourself Universe (21)
3 Material Lives, Transitional Moments (79)
4 Spaces of Belonging (125)
Part II: Questioning "Transmission"
5 Seeing Silence (185)
6 Landscapes of Local Memory (233)
7 Generational Frames (257)
8 The Album as Performance (285)
Part III: A Different Kind of Presence
9 Labors of Care and Repair (309) 
10 Photographs on the March (347)
Coda (395)
Acknowledgments (403)
Appendix: Notes on Method (409)
Notes (413)
Index (453)"Drawing on more than 50 Soviet-era family photo collections and extensive interviews with their owners, this is a stimulating meditation on how historical artifacts preserve and challenge the past."
—Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

“In Visible Presence 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…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…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.”
—Public Books

“Sarkisova and Shevchenko have produced a brilliant study of the powerful ways in which family photographs work, both privately and publicly, to manifest and sacralize the nation. Their case is the Soviet Union, vitally important. But their insights also challenge the reader to compare and contrast. Essential reading for our time.”
—Laura Wexler, Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Co-Chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale University; author of Tender Violence

“Sarkisova and Shevchenko offer a powerful, materially rich analysis of Soviet-era family photographs as affective touchstones for memory, loss, and absences. It’s poignant timeliness in a new era of conflict is a reminder of the power of photography to shape—and be shaped by—the social, cultural, and political landscape.”
—Donna West Brett, Associate Professor and Chair of Art History at the School of Art, Communication and English, University of Sydney; author of Photography and Place


“The delayed, liquid time of the snapshot spills over the decades in Sarkisova and Shevchenko’s documentation of the vernacular underbelly of totalitarianism. Presences and silences jostle against each other in an incisive narrative of how everyday images inform citizen historiography. This is a compelling and tragically topical investigation.”
— Christopher Pinney, Professor, Anthropology and Visual Culture, Department of Anthropology, University College London; coauthor of Artisan Camera: Studio Photography from Central India
 
Oksana Sarkisova is Research Fellow at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives and cofounder of the Visual Studies Platform at Central European University. She is the author of Screening Soviet Nationalities and coeditor of Past for the Eyes.

Olga Shevchenko is Paul H. Hunn ’55 Professor in Social Studies at the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College. She is the author of Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow and the editor of Double Exposure: Memory and Photography.