The edges of time in a family album

I once had a dream: I, a little girl, was running through a huge green field. The sun was shining brightly. Grass and wildflowers, daisies and cornflowers, almost as tall as me, I’m like a fairy gnome among them. I’m unusually light, happy and at ease. But suddenly, out of nowhere, black canvas boots appear and block my way. You can’t see the owner of the boots: they’re so big – all the way up to the sky! The boots stride right at me. I try to run away, but they come nearer and nearer. Fear and terror bound my legs – I stop, crouch down, shrink into a lump. And the boots are right above me..

Group portrait with great-great-grandparents sitting in the center . This is one of the oldest photos in our family album 10th century . On the far right, in the second row, stands my grandmother on my father’s side , a future pianist and music teacher. The use of a magnifying glass allowed for a pictorial emphasis. Judging by the painted background, the drapery, the screens regulating the light flow, the leopard skin on the floor where the youngest members of my family sit, and the soft light-toned pattern on the faces of the portrait subjects, we can conclude that the shooting took place in a large photographic pavilion with natural light, where one of the room walls was entirely glass. Alas, there are not many people in this picture I can call by their first names and patronymics.

And then I wake up. The fear immediately went away, but in my memory that nightmare dream remained for life. And then there are dreams that are repeated several times. And they are so photographically realistic down to the smallest details , that after a while they become a part of life itself the memory cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction, between what was real and what was a dream

But often the opposite is true: whole episodes and events disappear from my memory. And then the photos from the family album become a lifeline that allows me to go back in time. They are a litmus test, an indicator of the authenticity and sensuality of everything that has happened to us.

What are memories? Why does it preserve certain moments of our life so selectively and saves others, no less meaningful and significant for self comprehension in this world, in remote corners of our subconsciousness?? How family photographs can influence our lives? Perhaps a family album is a material connecting link of times and generations, and its mission is not only to fix memories and historical timeline of human existence, but also to support spirituality, Faith, Hope and Love.

And maybe the family album is a mirror of family memory and at the same time Ariadne’s thread, which can lead us out of the maze of hopelessness and moral decline?.. First within a family, then farther and deeper – of a village, a settlement, a city and, finally excuse my pathos our dear and long-suffering Motherland? We are still searching for the national idea. The family album may be the first step in finding and realizing it..

I posed these thoughts-questions to myself many times, and in an attempt to answer them I came up with the project “Edge of Time from the family album “, which has become the main subject of my work and photographic research at the moment. It is based on the figurative reflections of memory, which made it possible to see in a new way, to reflect more deeply, and sometimes to rethink the past.

At the same time, work on the project made it possible to restore in my memory the lost episodes of my family private life, in which, as in a mirror, the history and life collisions of many other families were reflected. The way of artistic-documentary reconstruction of old the earliest photograph in my family album is dated 1897 and contemporary photographs, the use of magnifying glasses as the author’s pictorial remark , direct and figurative refraction of photo prints through prisms and mirrors evoked a powerful emotional and emotional charge, which I hope will touch the viewer, and for someone, could become an impetus for creation and research of their family albums.

This old photograph depicts a group of high school students, including my grandfather far right . The photo is dated 1911. An old magnifying glass, light accent, and color contrast made his face stand out from his comrades. An old pocket-size mirror-portmanteau was chosen as a background, which became a kind of frame vignette, and its texture, along with documentary character and inclusion of modern elements sun and clouds into the image, made the image artistically expressive.

This is a portrait of an unknown girl. Judging by the clothes and the sepia toning, as well as the quality of the embossed paper, it’s very likely that the print could be attributed to the early twentieth century. Who is she?? What kind of kinship do we have in common?? Alas, there is no answer to these questions. But how expressive her face is, especially her eyes! The color solution duplex and mirror reflection, as the author’s pictorial remark, introduced an artistic dualism into the portrait. To some extent, for me it became an illustration of the female image of Alexander Blok’s era, in which this Stranger from my family album also lived.

One of the most tragic portrait images of the project. A broken mirror as a symbol of a difficult and tragic life. In the foreground is your grandmother, the one in the group family photo fig. 1 a young gymnasium girl standing on the right. On the back of the photo, only the city and the year: “New York. 1949”. Next to it, in the background, is a portrait of my father. He and other students of VGIK were arrested on a trumped-up case of an assassination attempt on Stalin… He and other young guys were saved by the fact that the windows of the apartment from which they were supposed to shoot at the leader did not face the street where he went to the Kremlin, but the yard. At the very last moment my execution was replaced by a prison camp for 8 years and then by exile to a steppe settlement in Kazakhstan. The portrait was painted by an artist friend, who, along with his father, was serving a prison sentence. It was forbidden to take photographs in the camp, but it was also impossible to forbid drawing. Rehabilitation came too late: my father died soon after his return from exile, from tuberculosis, before he had reached the age of 40..

I don’t know this man. How his picture ended up in our family album is also a mystery. On the back is the inscription: “Happy May Day – my friends, Dad and Mom. And the signature: “Your Vsevolod. Chita. 1937”. His face is very interesting and typical for the generation of the prewar and war years. Courageous and calm. The war befell on him. I don’t know what happened to him, whether he survived or not.

A photo of the war years. This is a group of children evacuated from New York to Irkutsk in 1941. The print is black and white, but there was a deliberate use of imbalance in exposure and lighting, so the picture turned out in a dramatic-fiery style. In the center, with a torn button on his winter coat, my future uncle, my father’s brother, is standing with a childish scowl. Twenty years later he would become a photojournalist and the last student of Arkady Shaikhet, a legendary photographer which must be the origin of my fascination with photography . An old mirror with peeling amalgam serves as a background and looking-glass, a kind of spatial corridor between the past and the present.

This is a collective portrait of my grandfather on my father’s side . Three sides of the pyramid, reflecting the three ages of his short and tragic life: the young gymnasium student, the young man before his wedding 1922 , the young man 1922 , and the young man 1922 . – Two years before my father’s birth , and one of the last photos before his arrest and execution in 1938. Grandma’s rehabilitation and acquittal by the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court was not achieved until eighteen years later.

The signature on the print and the cropped shape of the photograph are characteristic and precise signs of the time and place, indicating when and where the photo was taken. In those days you could make a photo not only of Pushkin as Okudzhava wrote but also of a monument or a bust of the leader of the world proletariat. i. A picture of Lenin, which stood in places of honor in all schools, cultural parks and vacation homes of our country. Now in the eyes of the younger generation it looks more like an amusing pictorial anecdote, but in those years it was perceived quite politically correct and vital. During the long exposure the mirror was moving quickly away from the photo, making a pictorial smearing of the image of the original reflected in it, which can be associated with turning over a page of family history, depicting an event in the life of many elderly people.

At what age do we begin to remember and experience the world? I personally date my first memories from a period of three to five years – they are scrappy, single and photo-like memory prints. I look at myself, 5 years old, with a smile and a touch of irony. Refracting a photograph in a mirrored prism has become a kind of bridge to time. A visual and sensual dialogue with my childhood

The photo “Admission to Pioneers on Red Square” is originally in black and white. Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”, one of the best films of all time, is still for me a source of insight, composition and expression, as well as a living textbook on the composition of frames. A historical fact from the history of the making of the film, when in the final scene the director himself used brushes to paint the flag red 108 frames! was deposited in my subconscious, and at the right moment it “closed” into a figurative photographic association. I, too, painted the banner and pioneer ties red. And I marked myself with a red circle. Truth be told, it was much easier for me than for Eisenstein, since my brushes were the tools of the graphic editor Photoshop. This visual echo of the masterpiece is also a kind of remembrance of our history. This shot is also an example of the fact that the use of retouching in documentary photography is not a literal “quotation”, but rather a retelling and “reinterpretation” of what we have seen. e. The author’s interpretation of a fact of life according to the laws of pictorial composition, historical context and visual perception. It is in this transformation of a life imprint, its natural copy, into a judgment that the basis lies for the transformation of documentary photography into an artistic transcription and figurative image.

Looking at this photo of my son, I catch myself thinking that the most valuable and important thing in the sensual perception of the world we get in childhood. Soap bubbles are one of the memory fragments in the feeling of Happiness.