Maria M. GOURIEVAEuropean University at Saint Petersburg
1 Shpalernaya ulitsa, Saint Petersburg, 109240, Russian Federation
Associate Professor at International School of Arts and Cultural Heritage
PhD (in Philosophy)
e-mail: mgourieva@eu.spb.ru
ORCID: 0000-0001-5606-0721
Olga Yu. BOITSOVAPeter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
3 Universitetskaya naberezhnaya, Saint Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation
Managing editor
PhD (in History)
e-mail: boitsova@gmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0002-8284-8915
Gourieva, M., Boitsova, О. (2025) Private Photography Between “Presence” and “Meaning”. Soviet Amateur Slides from the 1970s and 1980sAbstract: The article explores amateur photographic practice of slide (diapositive) photography, in the late XX century USSR. The research questions how the material circumstances of this medium affects and shapes the practices, their cultural meanings and social interactions within these practices. The theoretical framework of this research employs Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of “presence” – a subject’s sensory experience of the material, based on their “spatial relationship” to things, i.e.material objects. The empirical basis of the article is 10 oral semi-structured interviews with respondents who in the second half of the 1970’s – early 1980’s lived across the USSR and were involved in the practices of conception, processing, managing and demonstrations of diapositives. Other sources of this research are manuals for amateur photographers, articles in Sovetskoye Foto journal, as well as personal diaries and letters, from the collection of Prozhito center of study of ego-documents and private archives. The article examines in detail the complex of material conditions that ensured the existence of amateur diapositive photography during this period, and the affordances, i.e. the possibilities and limitations implied by these material conditions, It also describes the special corporeality of amateur photographers in their experiencing the material complex of the photographic at different stages – the taking/making of photographs, processing the film, viewing the images, managing home collections et c.. The phenomenon of home slide viewings is considered in the article as a special kind of event, the intensity of which is largely determined by material circumstances that directly affect both the viewer's somatic experience and the social situation of viewing. We demonstrate how the material characteristics of photography create the requirements, possibilities and conditions of experience in the context of amateur photography practices – the experience of the material world, images, interactions with them and with other people – and for the understanding of this experience.
Key words: slides (diapositives), private photography, amateur photography, photographic practices, production of presence, Late Soviet photography.
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For Citation: Gourieva, M., Boitsova, О. (2025) Private Photography Between “Presence” and “Meaning”. Soviet Amateur Slides from the 1970s and 1980s. International Journal of Cultural Research, 1 (58). 6–23. DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2025_1_6
DOI: 10.52173/2079-1100_2025_1_6
