Soviet Past in Domestic Photography: Events, Evidence, Erasure

Sarkisova, Oksana; Шевченко, О.С.

doi:10.4324/9780203792896-7

Cited by 20 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…This is a common fallacy in many existing attempts to distinguish between the different social planes of remembering, including John Bodnar’s (1992) distinction between official and vernacular memories, and the conceptual pair of cultural and communicative memory proposed by Jan Assman and John Czaplicka (1995). Consider, for instance, the status of socialist-era family photographs, such as those examined by Oksana Sarkisova and Olga Shevchenko (2014). While they originate in a space that is profoundly personal, they are never intended purely for individual consumption but are used to mark, remember and communicate significant moments in relation to intimate others, family members and friends.…”

Section: Between Public and Personal Memoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Memory, post-socialism and the media: Nostalgia and beyond

Mihelj

2016

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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it offers a critical review of the main trends in existing research, focussing on four key issues: the fascination with nostalgic modes of remembering, the dominance of national frames of analysis, the lack of research on the mediation of personal and vernacular remembering, and the privileging of descriptive over explanatory modes of analysis. Second, the article outlines a new agenda for the field, and proposes three main research trajectories. The first pays attention to how mediated memories at local and national levels interact with transnational processes of remembering the Cold War, the second focusses on to the intersections between personal and public modes of mediated remembering, and the last moves the discussion from description to explanation, using comparative approaches to advance explanations of different modes of mediated postsocialist memories.Keywords: memory, media, post-socialism, nostalgia, television, transnational memoryThe demise of state socialism in Eastern Europe triggered a profound restructuring of individual and collective relationships with the socialist past. Released from the straightjacket of Cold War politics, memories of the Second World War, the communist takeover and the decades of life under communist rule provided a rich resource for politically driven mythmaking across the political spectrum, as well as for creative engagements with the past in the visual arts and museums (e.g., Bernhard and Kubik 2014, Boym 2001, Sarkisova and Apor 2008, Tileaga 2012, Todorova and Gille 2010. Narratives of the socialist past also became important at vernacular and everyday level, and served as vehicles for making sense of the post-socialist transformation and for orienting one's own sense of identity and belonging (e.g., Berdahl 2010, Mark 2010, Mihelj 2014, Rabikowska 2013. The rich and growing body of scholarly work on post-socialist memory has by now provided important insights into the varied layers and processes of memory formation in the region, ranging from public to vernacular and personal memories, as well as helped further our understanding of mnemonic processes more generally, elucidating the ways in which they are affected by rapid political, economic and social changes.In recent years, the role of the media in shaping post-socialist memories has also begun to attract attention. One of the notable traits of existing research in this area is its preference for small-scale case studies focused on a single medium and situated in specific national locales (for an exception see Volčič 2007). So far film has received the most concerted attention, with studies typically privileging the analysis of cinematic texts over the analysis of audience reception and the political and economic uses of mediated representations of the past (Bardan In contrast, research concerned with the mnemonic functions of television is more sociologically minded, pays less attention to televisual representations themselves, but regularly reaches beyond the analysis of television programmes to investigate h...

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Section: Between Public and Personal Memoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2012) and photography (e.g. Petrović, 2009; Sarkisova and Shevchenko, 2014) started emerging as well.…”

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confidence: 99%

Memory, post-socialism and the media: Nostalgia and beyond

Mihelj

2016

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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“…“Soviet past in domestic photography: Events, evidence, erasure.” Double Exposure . Routledge, 2014. 147–174.…”

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confidence: 99%

Looking Together as Method

Gürsel¹

2023

Visual Anthropology Review

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Between 1896 and 1908, over 4300 Ottoman Armenians emigrated abroad through terk-i tabiiyet, an expatriation process that required emigrants never return to the empire. A key step in this process was sitting for a photograph. Using Ottoman Armenian expatriation photographs as an example, this article details "looking together" as a method for working ethnographically with photographs. It details three moments in time and three kinds of time to show how looking together yielded an understanding of how the state intended these photographs to function and how individuals conscripted these portraits of unbelonging into their own projects of belonging.

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