Identity and the Self
Even within the Soviet Union’s official style of socialist realism, many photographers found ways to develop their own pictorial approaches. As a language of representation, photography embraced creative possibilities ranging from realism to abstraction. Soviet photographers exercised autonomy through manipulation of the camera’s technological variables, such as depth of field, framing, and cropping. For most of the Soviet period, the aesthetics of naturalistic photography that documented life “as it was” dominated the practice.
Beginning in the 1960s, unofficial and nonconformist photography gained momentum and introduced new techniques and challenging subject matter. At the end of the Soviet period, photographers began to experiment with making themselves the subjects of their work. Photography about one’s self became a way to explore one’s personal subjectivity and sense of identity at a time when the nation and its future seemed in flux. In the series The Time When I Was Not Born, for example, Ludmila Fedorenko explores themes of memory and nostalgia using double exposure and print toning.
Ludmila Fedorenko (Russian, b. 1961)
Working in the early 1990s in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Ludmila Fedorenko uses images of the past to engage with the present. She created the works in this series by photographing found snapshots and altering them to convey the passage of time. Using darkroom techniques such as toning, double exposure, dodging, and burning, Fedorenko manipulates the found objects into a new visual form. The source photographs date to the 1940s and early 1950s and evoke a sense of normalcy during the oppressive era of Joseph Stalin’s rule. In her retrospective reworking of these personal images, Fedorenko examines the feelings of collective memory and family history by recalling Russia’s history.
