Donbas in Family Photo Albums: Interview with Vadim Lurie

Abstract

Donbas in Family Photo Albums:Interview with Vadim Lurie Victoria Donovan (bio) and Iryna Sklokina (bio) Vadim Lurie is a photographer and visual anthropologist from St. Petersburg, Russia. He has exhibited his photographs in Russia and Ukraine. His work has explored the visuality of protest activity in Moscow and St. Petersburg since 2012. He is also a collector of family photo archives, now working on a database consisting of nearly 50,000 pictures taken throughout the 20th century in different locations of the USSR and the post-Soviet area. The foundational collection of this database are the photo archives of residents of the Donbas region in Ukraine, where Lurie conducted three expeditions with local art activists after 2014. VL: My trips to Donbas were a sort of continuation of the conversations I'd started with Ukrainian friends and colleagues, begun in Kyiv mostly. I found myself on the Maidan in March 2014, when the conflict in Donbas was in its early days. I started talking to internally displaced people who had left either because of the shooting and military actions, or because they feared for their own lives because they were activists. Not necessarily political activists, but, for example, art activists, who have their own position on things. Their world had obviously just fallen apart. So, the project connected with photography grew out of my friends' efforts and my discussion with them about somehow reconstructing this world. Well, if not reconstructing it, at least showing somehow what kind of world it was. When I talked to people in Kyiv, very often I heard the following story: I managed to leave Donetsk or Luhansk or some other place and took only a family photo album with me. Or instead—I didn't manage to take a photo album with me, I left it in my parents' apartment and was only able to take my passport and other documents. So, when Kateryna Siryk [art curator, "Plus/Minus" art residency in Sievierodonetsk] and I began to think about what specifically can be done in order to represent this region, we came up with the idea to visit people and take a look at their photo archives. This is how the project "Donbas Family Photo Archive" was created. Its goals were to find a balance between the global and the local, the private and the public, the identification of visual subjects that are specific to Donbas; an attempt to determine what comprises the visual memory of the families living in one small region. [End Page 153] During the first expedition of this kind in 2018 I went to Donbas. There were altogether three expeditions. In the government-controlled Luhansk region (Sievierodonetsk, Rubizhne, Lysychansk) and a couple of small towns nearby (Zolote, Stanytsia Luhanska, and Shchastia). There was the third person in our team—Oleksiy Khodyko, I am very grateful to him for his support. He is native to the region. He was born in a suburb of Sievierodonetsk. He knew the local reality very well, and he knew lots of people. It was mostly down to him, particularly on the first expedition, that we were able to establish this network of contacts. Over the course of the three expeditions, 50 archives were digitized (in total, just over 14,000 files). My task as compiler was to make copies of everything, including poor quality photos. After processing and deleting some repeats, all files were entered into a specialized database in which they were tagged. I catalogued them according to subjects, stories, and content. The family archives are of different sizes: ranging from a little over two dozen to 700 pictures. Most of the photos date back to the 1960–80s—the golden age of amateur photography. However, it should be noted that the digitized archives represent the entirety of the 20th century; among them there are prerevolutionary portraits and photos taken before the mid-1990s. Family archives reflect the entire life journey of a person: birth registration; portraits of parents with their child; first haircuts; kindergarten holidays; school photos; high school graduation; student photos or (boys') photos from the army (often formatted into demob albums, dembelskii al´bom); weddings; funeral photos. Click for larger view...