War in Color

With the 70th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War (Second World War) just around the corner, I've been enjoying a lot of colorized photographs from around the web featuring the USSR at home and at the front. 

The latter was responsible for 80% of German losses. The Allies could not have opened up the second front had the USSR not taken the brunt of the German military-industrial machine. At the same time, my homeland lost over 26 million people, of which approximately 20 million were civilian. The totality of this experience has become a consolidating event of mythic proportions.

This myth (not in the sense of being untrue, but rather surpassing the possible) comprises a multitude of small bricks, as this war affected every Soviet family. Thus, I, too, was inspired to colorize some photographs of my grandparents, tinting their cheeks with subtle, but living color and bridging the gap between the past and the present.

The end of the war forced the winners to sit down and, despite loathing each other's ideology, they had to come up with mutually agreed upon rules.  This system is collapsing now, and new challenges are ahead. 

Grandpa

Normally, September 1st is the first day of school in Russia (USSR). It also happens to be my grandfather's birthday, or, rather, would have been. It is for this reason that the first calendar day of autumn reminds me of my childhood. 

Whereas economic reasons for having both parents in the workplace should not be overlooked, Russians have maintained a more traditional approach to raising children with much greater involvement on the part of the extended family, especially the grandparents.

And so, while our parents were at work, grandpa raised us.

Here he is, the littlest one, next to his brother and Princess Sverbeeva  (Abashidze).

And in the image above, he stands in front of a building with images of Lenin and Stalin in the background--a historic document of its time par excellence. 

Grandpa was an engineer and an architect, and did not retire until he was in his 70s.  

I have his work ethic. His attention to detail.

His temper.

When I was much too young, grandpa taught me how to count in German, to tap dance, and to sing offensive Soviet street songs from the 1930s. He spoiled my much-older cousins in the same way--a family tradition!

Thoughts like these always make me smile, and for a while I forget how much I loathe immigration. 

Grandparents in Batumi, Georgia, USSR.

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Grasping the Beyond

Early-morning birds chirping outside and lilac orchids blooming on the balcony, I'm at a family member's home in Moscow surrounded by hundred+-year-old paintings and icons along with a multitude of old photographs. Somber faces in the latter not only reveal the technical aspects of 19th- and early 20th-century portraiture, but also its aesthetic conventions.

There is a powerful impulse in these images that is oriented toward the Eternal, the Infinite, the Beyond in contrast to contemporary here-and-now artificially smiling counterparts (and it spans past the difficulty of maintaining a smile during slightly longer exposure times in photography from that era). In this sense, today's trend of making pictures "look old" and, therefore, "cool" underscores the simulacral nature of "INSTA(!)gramming" Postmodernity.

The photographs of my ancestors below had been taken throughout the European part of the Russian Empire prior to World War I.  I have refrained from editing out the ink blots and other sings of time, because I think it gives them character as documents in one's personal--unairbrushed--history.

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