Vicarious Photography and Postcolonial Figuration in Belarus*

Presence Without Identification: Vicarious Photography and Postcolonial Figuration in Belarus* SERGUEI ALEX. OUSHAKINE No new photographs until the old ones are used up! —Joachim Schmid1 What photographic possibilities does the head contain? . [Photo-portraits] strive from the beginning not so much to reproduce their subject as to demon- strate all the effects that can be teased out of it. —Siegfried Kracauer2 A man in a military uniform poses for the camera. He stands in a corner of an open terrace located somewhere high in the mountains. One of the man’s hands firmly holds the terrace’s railing; the other rests casually on his waist. Slightly off-center, the vertical of the officer’s body is counterbalanced by the hori- zontal rows of bars. Far below, a sea merges with the sky. The portrait would have been a typical memento from a summer resort, except for one crucial detail: The officer has no head, for the figure is cropped tight across the shoulders. Despite this violent erasure of the subject, the photo- graph is disturbingly serene, and the officer, though headless, exudes confidence and even a sense of control. Titled Presence, this gray-toned snapshot is part of a photo series created by Sergey Kozhemyakin, a prominent visual artist from Belarus. The word “created” * I want to thank Yve-Alain Bois, Natalija Arlauskaite, Alexei Golubev, Igal Halfin, Angelina Lucento, Olga Shevchenko, Kim Lane Scheppele, Perry Sherouse, and the Postcolonial Humanities Working Group at Princeton for their comments on the earlier drafts of this article. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues from Belarus, without whom I would have never discovered the Minsk School. My special gratitude goes to Igor Savchenko, Sergey Kozhemyakin, Vladimir Shakhlevich, Galina Moskaleva, and Vladimir Parfenok for sharing their time and work with me. The fieldwork for this research was funded by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. 1. As quoted in Martha Lanford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 32. 2. Siegfried Kracauer, The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography, ed. Philippe Despoix and Maria Zinfert (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014), p. 59. OCTOBER 164, Spring 2018, pp. 49–88. © 2018 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00323 by guest on 30 September 2021 50 OCTOBER Sergey Kozhemyakin. Presence. 1989–1992. conveys the nature of the series only to a point: The images are all from the per- sonal collections of Kozhemyakin’s relatives. From 1989 to 1992, Kozhemyakin rephotographed them, gradually compiling a small set called A Family Album: Real Photographs from Real Life: 1953–1989.3 In an interview with Kozhemyakin in Minsk in 2009, I asked him why he decided to crop the figure. He insisted that there was no alteration—“I would never allow myself to cut the head of my brother off”—and instead suggested his own reading of the image. In 1989, when he started working on A Family Album, “presence” (prisutstvie) was a term routinely used to refer to the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 (as in “the presence of a limited army contingent”). Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms put an end to this intervention, and the last Soviet military divisions were withdrawn from Afghanistan in February 1989. By fusing a political cliché with a found image of his brother, a military officer, Kozhemyakin offered an artistic generalization, a play with “a stereotype,” as he called it. His appropriation transformed the mechanical cut by the camera into a conceptual tool of sorts, creating a visual allegory for the unpopular and poorly conceived military invasion: a confident performance of the body unencumbered by the presence of mind. 3. The series is available at the photographer’s website, http://kozhemyakin.dironweb.com. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00323 by guest on 30 September 2021 Presence without Identification 51 This image, then, was “a certificate of presence,” as Barthes defined photography,4 but one that simultaneously certified an absence of the subject. It was a presence that made identification with the depicted individual impossible. As a rephotographed portrait, the image conveyed a second absence as well: that of the photographer. While activating a visual record of the past, Kozhemyakin left no traces of his own. I want to use this story about the retrospective activation of the photographic presence of decapitated military power as a starting point for exploring techniques of figuration elaborated by visual artists of the Minsk School of photography before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their emptied subjects— defaced but camouflaged—persistently demonstrated the structuring power of the uniform. Blurring the distinction between appearance and substance, these photographers presented subjectivity as a vocabulary of costumes and poses that could deliver meaning even when the identity of the performer could not be established. The past in these photographs was decontextualized and reduced to its material indices. This reduction, however, was not necessarily an operation of historical flat- tening. It was a mode of transcoding: History was approached as a storehouse of ready-made pieces that could be reactivated, reassembled, and reappropriated. In place of memory there were mnemonic objects, and facts become overshadowed by what Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s called faktura—that is, by the tangi- ble characteristics of historical artifacts, their textures, colors, shapes, and sounds. The plane of interiority was dominated by the plane of physicality.5 I will refer to these visual techniques of figuration as “vicarious photography” to make apparent both the ready-made nature of its sources and the type of indirect subjectivity that it portrays. As a visual “discourse of self-restoration,” vicarious photography shares its main qualities with prosopopeia: Both grant “the power of speech” to “an absent, deceased or voiceless entity.”6 Yet this process of giving “face to the faceless” assumes a significant difference in vicarious photographs; camouflaging the origi- nal face that “can be missing or non-existent” is not the main concern here.7 The goal is not to make the unknown “as intelligible and memorable as a face,” as Paul de Man would have it; rather, the aim is to seize “a mask or a face” as a vehicle for surfacing the presence of the unseen in familiar narratives and histories.8 To emphasize the productive effect of this version of prosopopeia, I use a more gram- matically flexible term, “enmasking.” I will read, then, these enmasking acts of 4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 87. 5. Philippe Descola, “Modes of Being and Forms of Prediction,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014), pp. 274–77. 6. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94, no. 5 (1979), pp. 925, 926. Prosopopeia is a rhetorical device that presents absent beings, animate or inanimate, as “confidants, witnesses, accusers, avengers, judges, etc.” by making them act and speak. Michael Riffaterre, “Prosopopeia,” Yale French Studies, no. 69 (1985), p. 107. 7. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 44. 8. De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” pp. 926, 929. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo_a_00323 by guest on 30 September 2021 52 OCTOBER visual figuration as a particular form of postcolonial appropriation through which Minsk photographers critically resuscitated and redeployed visual languages of the Soviet period. By relying on postcolonial studies for interpreting the post-Communist pre- sent of Belarus, I foreground a structural homology between the new states that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and more traditional sites of postcolonial experience.9 Postcolonies of Communism, despite coming out of a very different experience of domination, face the same fundamental question: how to engage with the colonial past without enabling its structure of subjectiva- tion. Vicarious photography, I suggest, allows presence without identification. Its “play with stereotypes” offers a way of recycling visual formulas of the Soviet period while simultaneously providing visual artists with expressive possibilities for demar- cating their authorial non-alignment with these formulas. In his study of postcolonial cultures in Latin America, Bill Ashcroft empha- sizes the ways in which power shapes and transforms the process of postcolonial “appropriation” of dominant discursive systems of representation. As Ashcroft observes, a colonized culture could absorb dominant forms by “making them ‘bear the burden’ of a different experience.”10 Such “tactical occupations” deploy dominant forms of representation “against their culture of origin” in order to control the frames and forms of self-representation.11 Ashcroft’s notion of appropriation as tactical occupation is critical for understanding the postcolonial specificity of working with cultural readymades: Postcolonial appropriations are not just anoth- er instance of the process through which reality—mythical or otherwise—is pack- aged in historically available metaphors; they are also forms of mimetic resistance. In the postcolony, techniques of appropriation are tools of re-signification, which offer subaltern groups “possibilities for ‘talking back’ to and through the cate- gories that have been created to contain” them.12 The photographic projects of the Minsk School of photography activate photo- objects of the past. Since this “secondhand” photography cannot document or objectify the photographer’s own gaze, it draws attention to the syntactic and rhetorical conventions that help vicarious photographers perform their acts of mimetic resistance. Found photographs are selected, combined, and visually transformed, 9. This article is not the place to discuss the applicability of postcolonial theory to post-Communist experience.

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