Photographer as a Wrecker: Fighting Unwanted Visuals in Stalin’s Russia

Abstract

The article examines several episodes from life in the Soviet Union in the 1930s cases of political persecution of artists, photographers, newspaper editors and printing workers for unwanted visual effects created by publishing images showing political leaders and some politically neutral images. In addition, the article analyzes the psychological mechanisms of “politically vigilant seeing.” Since a certain moment (about 1937), visual effects that were previously interpreted as accidental, and most often remained unnoticed, are interpreted as deliberate wrecking: a lock of hair on the forehead of a communist leader, a bouquet of flowers on a notebook, and a pattern that forms the leaves of the trees in a photograph. The article shows that the boundaries of randomness and non-randomness in question are not arbitrary. As Immanuel Kant pointed out, our vision is not a purely sensory process of grasping and registering data. The vision process is heavily influenced by intelligence and thinking, which shape raw sensory data into complete perception. Following Kant the author argues that physiological vision is invested by ideology. Differences in the perception of one object (not metaphorical, but rather physiological in this case) occur not only between representatives of different eras and cultures, but also in the perception of the same image by people with different ideological attitudes.