Monday, 7th October 2024, 5:30 CET
At this PoSoCoMeS seminar, Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko discuss thier book entitled “In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos” (MIT Press, 2023) with Mischa Gabowitsch and Anna Topolska.
Zoom link: https://lmu-munich.zoom-x.de/j/61182078743?pwd=TEpTM1BGRGZueXkyekpTaGpvU2tMUT09
About the book
“In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos” (MIT Press, 2023) brings together photographs from Soviet-era family photo archives and investigates their afterlives in post-1991 Russia. It is an extensive study of Soviet-era private family photo archives that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past. 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. With more than 250 black and white photos, this book 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. In Visible Presence was awarded an honorable mention for the 2024 Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from ASEEES.
Authors
Olga Shevchenko is Paul H. Hunn ’55 Professor in Social Studies at Williams College. She teaches and does research on visual culture and photography, post-socialism, and social memory in Russia. In addition to “In Visible Presence”, Shevchenko is the author of “Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow” (2009, Indiana University Press), and the editor of “Double Exposure: Memory and Photography” (2014, Transaction Publishers).
Oksana Sarkisova is Research Fellow at Blinken OSA Archivum and co-founder of Visual Studies Platform at CEU. She teaches and writes on film, memory politics, and amateur photography. In addition to “In Visible Presence”, Sarkisova co-edited “Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989” (2007) and authored “Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia” (2017).
Discussants
Mischa Gabowitsch is Professor of Multilingual and Transnational Post-Soviet Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany, and one of the founders of PoSoCoMeS. He has published widely on memory, commemoration, and war memorials, as well as protest and social movements. His most recent book, co-written with Mykola Homanyuk, is “Monuments and Territory: War Memorials in Russian-Occupied Ukraine”, forthcoming with CEU Press in November.
Anna Topolska is an independent scholar based in Poznań, Poland. She has published on the visual dimensions of wars and genocides, written theoretical essays on the question of visual truth and ethics, and methods of visual analysis, as well as co-edited a book on methodology of history. Currently she is working on a book entitled “Memory and Visuality. Representations of the Second World War in Poznań in the 20th and 21st centuries”. She is a co-Chair of PoSoCoMeS.
Mischa Gabowitsch and Anna Topolska are the editors of a special thematic issue of the Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society titled “Beyond Representation: The Visual Analysis of History Textbooks and Other Educational Media” published in 2023.
