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Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
Независимый исследователь, Москва, Россия
Independent Researcher, Moscow, Russia [email protected]
ПОЛИЦЕЙСКИЙ АРХИВ: ФОТОГРАФИЯ, ВЛАСТЬ И ЗРИТЕЛЬ
В статье рассматривается фотографическая коллекция Департамента Полиции, которая в настоящее время хранится в Государственном архиве Российской Федерации (ГА РФ). Предмет рассмотрения - ее изолированность, а также новые связи, установленные архивистами в процессе упорядочивания фотографических материалов с целью включения фонда бывшего главного органа политического сыска Российской империи в состав советского учреждения. Пример фототеки Департамента позволяет рассуждать о значении «политического» при формировании архива полицейской фотографии и на протяжении всего его существования. В конечном итоге, современный исследователь имеет дело с тем, что фотография внутри архива поменяла свой статус, превратившись из доказательства в молчаливый и руинизированный документ.
Ключевые слова: архив, документ, идентичность, полицейская фотография, руина.
POLICE ARCHIVE: PHOTOGRAPHY, POWER AND SPECTATOR
This article focuses primarily on the photographic collection of the Police Department, currently hosted by the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF). Special attention is given to its isolation and new links, established by the archivists while rearranging the photographic material in order to include collection of the former chief political surveillance agency of the Russian Empire into the structure of its Soviet successor. Department's photographic collection in this sense presents just a glimpse of a much bigger problem - the meaning of the politics while forming an 52 archive and its transformations in time. As a result contemporary investigators are faced with a radical shift in the status of the photographs, which have tran-sitioned from pieces of evidence into speechless documentary ruins of sorts.
Key words: archive, document, identity, police photography, ruin.
The concept of police photography is usually interpreted quite broadly, implying pretty much any photographic works created for police purposes. Perhaps, one of the earliest successful examples of such a project would be a series of 220 of portraits of homeless paupers by photographer Carl Durheim, commissioned by the Swiss government in 1852-1853 to assist identification and capture of tramps within the city of Bern1.
1 Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A cultural history (London: King, 2002). P.73. On the history of the
At the same time, scholarly literature on the topic teems with several bordering concepts,
police photography in Europe, see: Michel Frizot, Pierre Albert [et al.] (eds.), The New history of photography (N.Y.; Köln: Könemann, 1998) [published in French, 1994]. On the history of police photography in Russia see: Nadezhda Krylova, The history of the Police photo from the second half of the XIX century to the beginning of the XX century in Russia, "Is-toricheskiy Vestnik" [Historical Herald], No.6 (153), 2013, pp. 270-295. (In Russian).
| 4 (37) 2019 |
Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
like court and crime photography2, which emerged between the XIX and XX centuries. Texts on art critique tend to feature the latter term. For example, XX Century Encyclopedia of Photography, a comprehensive work, which seeks to define terminology for the many fields and branches of photography, prefers the same wording. Crime photography's definition is purely function-based: "recording, processing, and prosecutiong of criminal activity, all of which serving some functional purpose, aiding in the gathering of documenting of evidence either for testimony, records, or later in-vestigation"3.
One thing that crime, court and criminal photography all have in common is that their subject is either a person who committed a crime or anything that has to do with the case: victim, crime scene, evidence, the weapon of crime, etc. As opposed to these more specific fields, police photography offers a broader spectrum of possibilities for its researcher4. Not only do its subjects
2 The origins of "criminal" (or, "forensic") photography related to the system, worked out in the 1880-s by the servant of Paris prefecture Alphonse Bertillon. Nowadays the term "forensic" photography is primarily used in the field of forensic sciences. The use of such photography as one of the key preservation methodologies is normally limited to visual support for the laboratory or field examination opinion proffered at trial. Currently the shooting as a mean of registering must precede any other method of forensic objects' fixation. See, for example: Terrence F. Kiely, Forensic Evidence: Science and the Criminal Law (London New York Washington, CRC Press Boca Raton, 2001).
3Andrew Howe, Crime photography, in: Lynne Warren (ed.), Encyclopedia of twentieth-century photography (New York; London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 344-45.
4 The notion "police photography" is more frequent
while discussing photography in a more broad cultural context. See, for example: Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive, October. 1986, no.39, pp. 3-64; John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Pho-
include the criminal, but also the person taking a photograph, and, more generally, people and institutions which are involved in the process to some degree. The police photography framework allows shifting focus from the perpetrators to those outside the camera's view: an elusive and complex spectator's figure - a group of individuals, the beneficiaries, who all share a similar cultural settings. Moreover, perceiving an image is a two-way process: the viewer's presence helps distill its meaning, but at the same time the photograph itself dictates a certain logic of perception. As John Tagg argues in his remarkably influential book The Burden of Representation: "The photograph is not a magical 'emanation' but a material product of a material apparatus set to work in specific contexts, by specific forces, for more or less defined purposes"5.
In our opinion police photography should be viewed as a whole, being greater than the sum of its parts and affecting the meaning we attribute to individual photographs, which are perceived differently when included into a series and even more so in case of a more comprehensive system, such as archive. The very notion of police photography is only possible because it refers to the phenomenon in its entirety.
The archive in question does not refer so much to physical space (like national archive depositary), but rather an idea of a certain organizing system, which power needs to be able to communicate its anonymous statements, as Michel Foucault noted: "The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the ap-
tographies and Histories (University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
5 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 3.
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| 4 (37) 2019 |
Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
pearance of statements as unique events"6. Thus archives are inseparable from a certain type of power and its distribution within society and have to be analyzed along with its social institutes and modern practices7.
Any researcher in this field should keep in mind that no matter which archive they are working with, either state or private, every item within its contents went through a rigorous selection process, which is nowhere near random. As photography scholar Oksana Gavrishina puts it: "Knowing which institutions (with their respective policies) kept any particular photograph is crucial for understanding not only why it was preserved, but also how it was brought to our attention in the first place"8.
This paper will focus on the archive of the Police Department, currently hosted by the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF)9. We are mostly going to look at its collection of photographs, which had been set aside as an independent archival entity №1742. Its isolation and new
6 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 145.
7 See, Allan Sekula, Reading the Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital, in L.Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 443-52.
8 Oksana Gavrishina, Possibilities of applying visual studies approach to the teaching the Humanities, in "Gumanitarnie Chtenya" 2008 [Humanitaruan Readings], ed. Evgeniy Pivovar, Moscow: RSUH, 2009, pp. 38-39. (In Russian).
9 The archive was built up by the prescription of the
Government of the Russian Federation (28.04.1992 № 809). It is a legal successor of the Central State Archive of Russian Revolution, higher bodies of state authority and bodies of state administration of the USSR (ZGAOR SSSR) and Central State Archive Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (ZGA RSFSR). Official page of the GARF [online] http://www.statearchive.ru/ (accessed: 28 Feburary 2019).
links, established by the archivists while rearranging the photographic material, will be of our utmost interest.
Just how exactly the archive of the former chief political surveillance agency of the Russian Empire was formed within its Soviet successor is not exactly clear, and at times downright confusing. It makes one wonder what role did the political aspect play in its creation. Department's photographic collection in this sense presents just a glimpse of a much bigger problem, in same way images themselves do, as in police practice they have never existed as stand-alone units, but rather as tools.
However, once the photographic collection had been upgraded to an independent entity, its status of a subsystem had been subsequently undermined, presenting a new challenge for a re- 54 searcher in terms of information organization. — Stripped of their previous meanings and links, the images now carry old useless codes and/or inscriptions, which make little sense today (like names and aliases of perpetrators, detectives' last names). Thus contemporary investigators are faced with a radical shift in the status of the photographs, which have transitioned from pieces of evidence into speechless documentary "ruins" of sorts (Fig. 1).
In 1917 the entire collection of the Department had been significantly plundered10, and as documents were being moved from one storage space to the another, they have naturally been all
10 According to the researchers, there was an unspoken order of the police authorities, which required subordinates (in case of disorders with the risk of seizure of police stations and institutions of political investigation) to destroy the materials of agents, perlustration. See: Zinaida Peregudova, Political Investigation in Russia (1880-1917) (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000), p. 221 (In Russian).
| 4 (37) 2019 |
Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
Fig. 1 (A, B) Photography of Gerantovsky investigated by the Police Department in 1877. Boutrimovich Photography. GARF, collection №1742, inventory 4, file 82.
mixed up, archival units dispersed. Hours of meticulous work with codes and recordkeeping system allowed for the whole Department's collection to be integrated into the archive. Department's case files till 1917 (when it ceased operations) have been restored to their original state (but not the photographic collection)11.
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11 Work on the restoration of the case files of the De-
partment was politically valuable and conducted by
Between 1924 and 1934 the Revolution and Foreign Office archive (currently Imperial Russian History subdivision of GARF) saw the
Special Commission to investigate the activities of the police Department under the chairmanship of P.E.Schegolev. At the same time this work had a certain degree of publicity: it was assumed that the information about the archive will be published in "Agendum" (not implemented), also in March, 1919 the reading hall of the archive was opened. See: Naumov V. Petrograd's Historico-revolutionary Archive (PIRA) in Mironenko S. V. (ed.), History of the State Russian Archive. Documents. Papers. Memoirs (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), p. 35 (In Russian).
| 4 (37) 2019 |
Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
beginning of the reorganizational effort, directed this time at the Police Department photography collection. Those images, which previously formed part of the Central Register Office12 within Police Department's Recordkeeping Facility №8 were set aside first. Apart from this set of records, images from other sources were analyzed and gathered simultaneously. Those sources included: Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own Chancellery, Moscow Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order, Chief Moscow Gendarme Department, Moscow Chamber of Appeals and some private archives as well. The unearthed photographs were separated from the files, described and entered the archival registry. Nevertheless, those shots, which could not be identified, remained as unsorted "miscellanea" (rus. rossyp). Collectively all these images were referred to as the Photographic Collection and formed part of the Police Department archive till 1957. Because the collection ended up being so little homogenous, hosting material from widely differing sources, a separate archival entity №1742 had been established. Identification and description of the images went on till the 1960s when the images changed hands again, landing first in the Science Library of Main Department of Archives, and then they were finally transferred to the modern-day GARF between 1974 and 1984.
As for the photography collection, it is a brand new entity within the archival structure and can be considered a monument to the Soviet era. It embraced Departments' records from 1880 till 1917, as well as media from other organizations (Third Section of His Imperial Majesty's Own
Chancellery, Chief Moscow Gendarme Department, Moscow Secret Police Department, and Moscow Local Secret Police Department), photographs from personal files and images, which have been purposefully removed from Department's documents. As the archive employee Zinaida Per-egudova writes:'Photographs have been divided into several groups, each one a separate item in the inventory, based on the specific character of the image [emphasis added - N.K.] or inscriptions if any were present"13.
Consequently, nowadays it is almost impossible to determine the original source for most of the images, and even harder to imagine what the original Department's print collection (rus. "fototeka") looked like. Some of the end dates of these documents exceed well beyond 1917, which brings us to two insights: first of all, new items
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were continuously added during the Soviet epoch — and, secondly, that the collection was constantly referred to even after Department had stopped functioning.
It is worth having a closer look at the archival inventory item №2 (assembled between 1918 and 1928), which comprises photographs of policemen and secret agents because it seems quite representative. We should note here that during the first few decades of the Soviet rule archives of former political entities were of great importance to the new power. Not surprisingly it was precisely the State Political Directorate - the secret police of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1934 (Obyedinyonnoye gosudarstvennoye politicheskoye upravleniye or OGPU in Russian) started insisting on moving Imperial Russian main gendarme-police and judicial institutions archives
12 This office was responsable for photographing persecuted individuals from 1908 till 1910. In 1910 the entire collection had been moved under the jurisdiction of the Secret Police Department.
13 GARF Dossiers of the fonds 1742 (Print Collection), inventory 3, p. 1.
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Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
from Leningrad to Moscow14. The archives were viewed as a valuable source of background checks, which were performed upon request for All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution, Speculation, and Sabotage (also known as the VChK), Moscow ChK, criminal courts and revolutionary tribunals. The main idea behind all the work was to reveal and disclose agents of tsarist secret police, provocateurs, former high-ranking Imperial statesmen, and other individuals, deemed political criminals by the Soviet Power15. Background screening was carried alongside other activities, such as sorting files, analyzing image contents and source, creating inventory. Sometimes political tasks were combined with the archival ones, like, for example, a catalog of the Moscow Secret Police agents and a list to the photo albums of this unit made by archival workers alongside the current routine in 1918-191916.
The documents, which form part of the archival inventory item №2, were purposefully gathered for the sake of combating counterrevolu-
14 Dodonov B., Naumov V. The Archive of Revolution and Foreign Affairs (1925-1932), State Archive of Revolution (1932-1941), Central State Historical Archive in Moscow (1941-1961), in Mironenko S. V. (ed.), History of the State Russian Archive. Documents. Papers. Memoirs (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), p. 100 (In Russian).
15 Naumov V. Moscow Historico-revolutionary Archive (MIRA) in Mironenko S. V. (ed.), History of the State Russian Archive. Documents. Papers. Memoirs (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010). (In Russian), pp.18-19; Naumov V. Petrograd's Historico-revolutionary Archive (PIRA) in Mironenko S. V. (ed.), History of the State Russian Archive. Documents. Papers. Memoirs (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010). (In Russian), pp. 37-38.
16 Naumov V. Moscow Historico-revolutionary Ar-
chive (MIRA) in Mironenko S. V. (ed.), History of the
State Russian Archive. Documents. Papers. Memoirs
(Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010). (In Russian), p. 18.
tionary individuals too17. There are photographs of field surveillance agents and informers, officers of Independent gendarme corps and policemen, executioners and prison wardens, as well as priests who happened to be locums in prison. Even file structure has something to say. A typical one consists of three elements: a photograph, collaboration with Police Department form, and special council verdict or OGPU board's decision (Fig. 23, 4, 5).
The whole purpose of a police archive is to allow to a servant/researcher/archive employee to find quickly and efficiently any individual case from a huge number of storage images. A well-designed system allows for an infinite expansion of such an archive, with the possibility of adding countless new items to the existing structure. Individual series in such collections are subject to 57 narrative logic, but the overall structure is free — from the narrative paradigm and instead is governed by the archive paradigm, which tends to neutrality and objectivity: "The pleasures of this discourse were grounded not in narrative necessarily, but in archival play, in substitution, and in a voracious optical encyclopedism"18. Ironically, sometimes the desire to make an archive as complete as possible can backfire at its creators, who themselves become its subject. In general police archives tend to be quite ambivalent: collectibles and collectors can swap places whenever politics is involved. Any image whatsoever could at some point be included in the archive and testify against its owner. As Sekula states: "[...] the general condition of archives involves the subordination of use to the logic of exchange. Thus not only are the
17 GARF. Dossiers of the fonds 1742 (Print Collection), inventory 2, p. 1-2.
18 Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive, October, No.39, 1986, p. 58.
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Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
pictures in archives often literally for sale, but their meanings are up for grabs. New owners are invited, new interpretations are promised"19.
Moreover, a great deal of photographs ended up in the archive after house searches and detentions. A big part of those are everyday portraits, made in a photo studio, carrying dedicatory inscriptions. As stand-alone objects, these photographs might not even have had the slightest connection to a person who was the subject of investigation. The very fact of including those some-
Fig. 2-3. GARF, collection №1742, inventory 2, file 5. File case of Akimov Nikolay Pavlovich. Documents: proof of spying for the Moscow Secret Police Department from 1905 till 1917. This case also provides a three-year deportation to the Ural verdict issued by the Special Council of the NKVD in 1924 (1898-1924)).
times seemingly random images into an archive, a controlling entity, was changing their status to "political"20.
In most cases, the decision to include a certain individual into the archive would be based solely on their biography, which did not even have to be authentic and could contain multiple narratives or be downright fictional. Physical appearance was key to anyone's background. If no connection could be established between the person's looks and their life experiences, they became invisible to the police archives. It is no coincidence that fugitive peasants, exiles escaping from Siberia and other tramps, who were "oblivious of descent" (literally insisted on not remembering who their relatives were) constituted the majority of all
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Ibid, p. 444.
20 Thus, fund stores numerous photo portraits seized as evidence during searches and arrests (including images of K.Marx, F.Engels, A.Bebel, V. Liebknecht, V. Lenin, M.Gorky, V.Korolenko, K.Stanislavsky, A.Chehov etc.), kept by revolutionists.
19
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Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
time detectives were developing a special skill to remember and picture a face from a photograph or even just a detailed description of that person, as if they had met them in person. Such agents could store that person's face in their memory for many years, despite meeting hundreds and hundreds of people in the meantime"22.
Fig. 4 Examples of collaboration with Police Department forms. GARF, collection №1742, inventory 3, file 1396.
offenders in Russian Empire. Having biography added a temporal dimension to the perpetrator's personality. As Secula points out "Identity is the permanence of the person, it is the personality looked at from the point of view of its dura-tion"21.
Understanding changing human body, the ability to see through its possible transformations (both natural and artificial, like disguise) has always been a part of training for field surveillance special agents. As gendarme officer Pavel Zavar-zin notes in his memoirs: "With the passage of
Fig. 5 A, B. GARF, collection №1742, inventory 2, file 9. Case of Altgauzen N. I.
Thus photography brought two notions to the police work: the temporality and changeability of people's appearance. Agents used photographic
21 Allan Sekula, The Body and the Archive, October, No.39, 1986, pp. 24-25.
22 Pavel Zavarzin, Work of the secret police// Tsarist secret police ("Ohranka"): The memoirs of the secret police departments' chiefs (Moscow: New literary observer 2004). (In Russian). V.1, p. 428.
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Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
images to practice identifying individuals despite their age, clothing and other distracting elements. This skill, which seems quite trivial today, began to take shape at the end of the XlXth and beginning of the XXth century.
It is worth noting that without any regard for the rupture caused by the 1917 Revolution, biographies inside the archive continued to persevere, to be somehow registered. Their continuity formed the undisrupted baseline - some inner police archival mechanisms were at work, notwithstanding the dominant political narrative of the moment, generated by the relations of power and subjection in a very broad sense. At the same time, the archive has a more fluid history, which is constantly in very close touch with the current political context. The latter deeply affects the material condition of the archive's existence (foundation, (re)structuring, demolition etc.).
In the more than hundred years of this police archive history some crucial points can be identified. The first period, until 1917, was purely functional. Police officers used the photographic collection for work-related purposes, which mainly consisted of identifying perpetrators. The second period (1920-1930) pretty much saw the same dynamic of images as tools, except that the political situation in the country had changed dramatically. Neither of the periods was in any way connected to the idea of preserving the past. The archive was still heavily connected to the present, it contained the traces of oppression, punishment, and control.
The photographic collection, which was ruined during the Revolution, was brought back to life in the second period. The archival employees have scrupulously separated whatever images they could find, purposefully cutting them off their previous imperial secret service background. The
core collection of more than 50,000 units was formed23. As mentioned earlier, rather than just tearing old connections the archivists were generating new meanings: they combed through the Special Department's filing cabinets, "landed" criminals and created brand new file cases with relevant photos and reports.
The third period (approximately after the 1940s, though documented only from 1957, when the photographic collection left the Police Department unity) clearly reflects the general democratic shift in how archives were viewed: as means of preserving one's own history24. Fairly easy access had been granted to a much wider audience. The overall understanding of archival practices changed as well, becoming more complex. This new treatment of the archive corresponded to the new "type of power"25 which appeared to replace 60 "appalling and unsupportable power of the usurper — and his unlimited will to control"26.
Alongside the archival employee's intention, as Michel Foucault specifies it, to organize
23 GARF, Dossiers of the fonds 1742, p. 18, reference № 3.
24 Denis Goloborod'ko examines two strategies of archival construction: first one asserts the free-for-all access to memory (idea fostered by the French Revolution), second one takes over from the previous one and serves as effective restricted area for control (historically, this strategy started to proliferate after the declaration of the First Empire). Goloborodko traces the same radical shift in the transformation of the soviet idea of the national archive. See: Denis Goloborod'ko, National archive: political history of the memory in Helen Petrovsky (ed.), Culture and Revolution: Fragments of soviet experience 1920-1930-s (Moscow, 2012), pp. 28-46. (In Russian).
25 Denis Goloborod'ko, National archive: political history of the memory in Helen Petrovsky (ed.), Culture and Revolution: Fragments of soviet experience 1920-1930-s (Moscow, 2012), p. 28.
26 Ibid.
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Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
the documents, divide them up, distribute them, order them, arrange them in levels, establish series, distinguish between what is relevant and what is not, discover elements, define unities, describe relations27, the entire collection changes its role from mere evidence of guilt and transforms into a memorial (as Foucault writes "monument"). Slowly but surely the images lose their connection to the present and the power of authentification with it.
To emphasize this ambiguity of the photographic image, philosopher Oleg Aronson argues: "The paradoxical feature of the photograph entails the fact that photography is something that not only documents a certain event in the past ("his has happened") but not so much the memory of an event; rather, it preserves how this event had been forgotten"28. Images preserved in the modern archive are staying in the state of flickering - they equally can be involved as historical documents and, left by the power, easily become affective evidences, the traces of the past, "that are distinct from one another, irreducible to a single law, [...] that bear a type of history peculiar to each one, and which cannot be reduced to the general model of a consciousness that acquires, progresses, and remembers"29.
Data about certain archival items gets lost; old information organization system is erased; unidentified material and people keep piling up. The police machine stops in its tracks. It seems like in
nowadays archive gets further and further away from the power. There is no more fine-tuned mechanism which would allow for easy classification and order. The photographs lose the binding power of interpretation, which previously had held them together: pictures become "atomized, isolated and homogenized"30.
Nevertheless certain deep-laid power machinery continues to produce its statements within the framework of archivists" modi operandi, which in turn surges from the police archive inner logic. This phenomenon is largely connected to "the unmanageable excess of photographic mean-ing"31, which resists being fitted into the Procrustean bed of the "primary source" concept. Apparently, Alphonse Bertillon's image organization system, which he devised at the end of the XIX century, still affects how visual material is processed in contemporary archives. The method — goes as follows: essentially the photographs are distilled into text, just as Bertillon interpreted the multiple signs of the criminal body to a textual shorthand and numerical series32. Looking for similarities in photographs and compairing in fact their protagonists, the archivists continue to work with the images from the power relations perspective, which is then reflected in the names of the categories: mug shots; criminal offenders; secret agents; images retrieved during house searches and detentions. The inventory list of famous people is alphabetically ordered, employing the ency-
27 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 6.
28 Oleg Aronson The moment of the document and the completeness of the memory in Irina Kaspe (ed.), The status of a document: an expropriated certificate or conclusive piece of paper (Moscow: New literary observer, 2013), p. 219. (in Russian).
29 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 7.
30 Allan Sekula, Reading the Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital, in L.Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 446.
31 John Tagg, Everything and Nothing: Meaning, Sense and Execution in the Photographic Archive, "Siniy Divan" [Blue Sofa], No.21, Moscow 2016, p. 130.
32 See more on this: Allan Secula, Allan Sekula, The
Body and the Archive, October, No.39, 1986, pp. 3-64.
| 4 (37) 2019 |
Надежда КРЫЛОВА / Nadezhda KRYLOVA
| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
clopedic principle. This paradigm is foreign to the logic of a family archive or individual memory. The images within the collection partially belong to the power, and partially to nobody. This latter "miscellanea" - mountain of scattered, unsortable documents - indivisible surplus images resists any order whatsoever and hardly can be appropriately categorized.
As was mentioned above the line between photographs commissioned for policing purposes and those everyday pictures (partly presented as corpus delicti, partly came from the former miscellanea) is not so clear. The images easily drift from "instrumental" to "sentimental realism"33, showcasing the play of meaning, attributed by the viewers, and capturing the "structure of gaze"34 fixed on them. This free flow of photographs between categories is greatly related to the fact, that all the items in the archive structure are treated equal, and that their value as separate objects seems to be nonexistent.
There is a certain shift in perception of these everyday, personal images, once they come under the spotlight of a police archive. Contemporary viewers tend to perceive the entire collection as a series, in which "every photograph that follows refines and finesses our perception of a certain image [...] The seriality, which is so representative of the photographic medium, is not dictated exclusively by its technical parameters, but
33 Sekula's terms introduced in the essay: Allan Seku-
la, Reading the Archive: Photography between Labour and Capital, in L.Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 450.
34 Oksana Gavrishina, Whose reality? Portrait in the Lithuanian photography of 1940-1950s in Oksana Gavrishina, Whose reality? Portrait in the Lithuanian photography of 1940—1950s in Oksana Gavrishina, Empire of Light: Photography as visual practice of modernity (Moscow: New literary observer, 2011), pp. 44-55. (In Russian), p. 44.
also by power practices"35. The classification, multiplicity itself is lying in the core of policing apparatus: it deals equally with typing people in the widest sense of this word and with certain "seriality" innate to its routine practices as well. Starting from the end of the 1890s instruction manual for mug shots insisted on taking a sequence of images. It required criminals to be first pictured in overclothes, then without coats and hats. Sometimes, if a perpetrator was using a disguise, it was also photographed36. Currently, archivists continue breaking up the unsorted contents of the archive into series37.
John Tagg argues that "a discourse is not a context and the discursive production of photographs is not premised of the convenient emptiness of the photograph, but on the constant production of the fullness of photographic meaning - 62 making it arrive, multiply, differentially, discon- — tinuously, contradictorily, without completion"38.
The police archive is not only capable of "making arrive" a certain play of power placed in the images, but also sucking the viewer into it, who is all too familiar with this type of photographs and recognizes it with ease. The role of researcher analyzing a collection is not that different from that of a judge or a detective.
35 Ibid, p. 47, 50.
36 Instruction manual for mug shots: GARF, Fonds 102 (Special unit of the Police Department), inventory 260, case file 269, 1902-1907, p. 31.
37 For example case file "images of young men wearing hats" (GARF, Fonds 1742, inventory 7, case file 23, 1905-1917), which features mug shots of the criminals with nearly equal clothes and in the same interiors.
38 John Tagg, Everything and Nothing: Meaning, Sense and Execution in the Photographic Archive, "Siniy Divan" [Blue Sofa], No.21, Moscow, 2016, pp. 127149. (In Russian), p. 132.
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| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
The perpetrators were subjected to a rigorous disciplining of the body when being photographed for police purposes. The disciplining could be applied to the posture and position of the person but was powerless to control their feelings and emotions, which surfaced on the only part of their body still free from regulation - their gaze. Criminal and everyday photographs coexisting in the same archive illustrates the stark difference in how offenders and regular people look into the camera (although many a time it would be the same person in different situations). Political prisoner's gaze holds a special status, making power visible on the very image. When following the biography of the same person - a survivor of the 1917 Revolution, through the lens of the archive, one cannot help but notice the many differences between visual regimes. The changes in official police shooting techniques during the tsarist and Soviet periods are remarkable: close-ups become more prevalent; full body shots and mounting disappear; the distance between the camera and its subject shortens. Most importantly, however, the attitude towards the "new" power is documented through the gaze of the person.
A look from the depths of a police photograph, which was originally destined for the structures of power, ends up being directed at us. Us recognizing or not the experiences and order of (photographic) power, which it documents, triggers "the enactment of a discursive event"39. Both the viewer and the researcher can end up trapped in a power relations net, which launches the discursive generation of photographic meaning over and over again.
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39 John Tagg, Everything and Nothing: Meaning, Sense and Execution in the Photographic Archive, "Siniy Divan" [Blue Sofa], No. 21, Moscow, 2016, p. 132. (In Russian).
The dynamic of this is process is of regressive nature: previously it was the effort of power in the context of an institution (in our case the police archive), which captured and froze a photograph's meaning. However, it was then displaced by encounter of two gazes, the presence of a spectator, looking from the new situation of "postphotographic" gaze.
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| Полицейский архив: фотография, власть и зритель / Police Archive: Photography, Power and Spectator |
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