A REMOTE BARELY AUDIBLE EVENING WALTZ
My friends and I found these photographs in a former communal
apartment in St. Petersburg in the fall of 2010. The photographers,
a woman (archaeologist and ethnologist) and her engineer husband had
died. Their apartment was sold; and the color slides were destined
to go into a rubbish bin together with other personal things.
I happened to photograph what was left in their apartment; and then
began to browse through the abandoned photo archive. It contained
thousands of slides shot between the early 1960s and mid-1980s.
We also found some documents and letters that gave us a rough idea
of who the owners were.
An analogy with archaeology suggests itself here: you find some
evidence and create a tentative representation of people and their
lives — or rather, of their lives’ external features. Using what
remained of personal items of everyday routine, we could ascertain the
person’s social standings but would not find out their names,
thoughts, preferences; neither would we guess whom they had loved.
We could only imagine that.
So, is there a big difference between photographs found in someone’s
former apartment and broken pieces of pottery unearthed from ancient
tombs? Can photographs per se provide us with information on people
depicted in them, except for external features — gender, design of
glasses or car brand, and an approximate date, of course? Hardly.
Looking at history we see a set of inaccurate and fragmented
representations of it, put in some scientific or artistic order by
someone — a scientist or artist. It’s like hearing a remote, barely
audible evening waltz. And talking about archaeology: while I was
editing the slides, my father came to St. Petersburg to attend a
conference devoted to the memory of professor Bernstam, a prominent
mid-20th century Russian archaeologist. My father was just twenty
years old when he first met professor Bernstam in 1951 and, after this
encounter decided to pursue archaeology as a profession.
That life-changing meeting was also attended by several other
archaeology students including one of Bernstam’s future wives, Galina
Babanskaya.
It was Galina’s archive of color slides that we found in her former
communal apartment; the place where she was born and spent her entire
life, including several years with professor Bernstam. After his
death, she lived with another husband, an engineer named Veniamin
Averbach. Galina died in the early 2000s. Veniamin died in 2009.
Among the old slides, there were a few shot by Galina in Japan in 1974
where she had stayed for several months preparing a Soviet
ethnological exhibition. After having edited slides and photographed
old things that were about to disappear forever, I showed the images
to a friend. In one of those ‘Japanese’ slides, she recognized her
aunt — apparently, a colleague of Galina’s.
These strange coincidences, as well as the amazing photos found and edited into a poetic visual sequence, conjure up an image of an infinite chaos of history — a history of vague memories and invisible bonds between people as opposed to the ‘history‘ we had been taught and were used to: that of a linear ‘development’ or heroic ‘events’. The latter is, in essence, no less fictional than this book of found pictures.
Browse the book here.
