Time facets. From the family album

I do not remember anything more inelaborate and responsible about the history of the family in the XX century in the national photography. Svetlana Pozharskaya was doing her work in 2012–2016.

When in Russia (at that time Soviet Union), Perestroika and Glasnost began, some photographers managed to overcome their muteness and tell about the terrible 1930s. Some of them continued and dedicated their artistic works to the 1940s–1950s; less mentioned in the conversations about political repressions, though it didn’t mean there were no repressions at that time. Among the Soviet and Russian photographers who worked with the tragic decades were: Vitas Luckus (Lithuania), Igor Savchenko (Belarus), Vladimir Shakhlevich (Belarus), Sergey Kozhemyakin (Belarus), Dmitry Vyshemirsky (Russia), Alexey Titarenko (Russia), Andrey Chezhin (Russia).

The majority of those projects was based on the photographers’ family stories. They extended the topic description to the global scale of the whole nation tragedy. As if it was disgraceful to talk about one’s personal pain in the face of national one, it seemed impossible, there was grief and fear… despite the passed peaceful years. In Russia of the XX century it was improper to know and discuss openly the history of a family, especially if there was more than one family generation.

This period of oblivion, with its blurred insight of the History with personal presence of ancestors in it, is replaced with the awareness of personal presence in it. And the pain has returned. They say, pain comes with ages when an artist realizes that the period behind is bigger than one ahead…

It was Svetlana Pozharskaya’s case. Beside family documents, photocopies, souvenirs she found an exact form for the narration about her family. A broken mirror, magic glass prisms and multifaceted spheres, magic crystals were so popular among the intellectuals of the beginning of the XX century. Through them, it seemed to be possible to see the future. No one could foresee what it would be the way it proved to happen and no one could believe in such future… And everything turned out to be even less possible.

With visual culture of Modernism epoch, Svetlana Pozharskaya leads us from picture to picture, from the broken ballerina figurine in memory of her mother, who did not become a dancer, from the award-winning watches of the war period to the statuette of the hero-pioneer, as in father’s childhood… Photograph makes items tell history in clear readable manner. I do not know anything that was created about our common past in photography of recent years having such piercing intonation of silent questioning and deep sadness.

Irina Chmyreva, Ph.D.