Refusing to Fade: Soviet Domestic Photography Archives as Memory Strongholds

In Visible Presence: Soviet Afterlives in Family Photos, the result of a long-lasting intellectual endeavor that began around 2006 and was ultimately published in 2023, immediately captivates the reader with its commanding and elegant materiality.At first glance, the book recommends itself as a photographic album, due to the excellent quality of its glossy paper and its rich iconographic material.Nearly all of the reproduced photographs return the viewer's gaze in the most literal sense, prompting an immediate affective engagement with the content.This prevents the casual graze over the surface that many beautiful "books as objects" elicit and instills a sense of responsibility towards the researchers' ethical as well as theoretical tenets.Beyond the appearance of the book, this ethical dimension is what instantly grabs attention, insofar as the preface starts by thematizing the sinuous paths post-Soviet domestic photography archives relentlessly take.It illustrates its ar-gument with a snapshot of a military unit stationed in Kyiv -taken in 1947, found by the two authors in 2007 in a photo album during an interview with its Russian possessor, and commented upon in 2022, in the light of the war of aggression led by Putin's regime against Ukraine.Similarly, the book closes with Sarkisova and Shevchenko's reflections on the weight, but also the honor, of having been granted intellectual, if not material, guardianship of the photographs they have encountered during their investigation of Southern and Central Russian families' care practices for private visual media.Thus, the dense, polyvalent, and engaging research carried out by the authors, which follows several transversal conceptual axes, is firmly grounded in a heightened awareness of the sensitivity of the ma-terial being dealt with.They remain mindful of its historical situatedness as well as of its temporal dis-persion, recognizing the many shreds of unresolved past(s) that perforate the layers of both national and familial heritage laid upon the photographs under scrutiny.Besides the objectual and ethical gravitas of the book, what becomes quickly apparent is the extent to which Sarkisova and Shevchenko's effort fills the lacunas left by the growing body of articles and theses on the functions and configurations of amateur photography in the Soviet space.Each of these earlier studies created small islands of specialized knowledge that struggled to coalesce into a comprehensive map of the whole phenomenon.The fact that the previous explorations of themes that also surface,