Stop-Frame. Nostalgia

“Stop-frame. Nostalgia” (for the story of collective photographs in Russia)

This photo project devoted to nostalgia is the continuation of a literary edition of SNOB magazine (7/8, 2014). From time to time SNOB poses global questions related to human existence and invites its authors to reflect on them. Such was the case with projects like ‘Everything About My Father’, ‘Everything About Eve’ or ‘Everything About My Home’. Professional writers joined this exchange, but also those who simply had something to say on the topic under review. In that sense nostalgia is a truly unlimited theme. For some it means happy childhood memories, for some a deep love experienced in their youth, and for others a yearning for ‘daydreams of our Homeland’. As the émigré poet Georgy Ivanov wrote in Paris in the early 1930s: ‘The years pass in a haze. Alternately one moment we breathe the musty air of freedom, the next the untrammelled chill of the gaol’.

Collective photographs from the archives of SNOB project participants provide an illustration of these very different texts. Some were taken by established maîtres like Valery Plotnikov and Andrei Bezukladnikov, but most are amateur shots undistinguished by any particular artistry. They are interesting for just one reason: as a precise record of a certain period and of who we once were. Moreover, I think the genre of the collective photograph dictates a specific state of consciousness for everyone who comes into focus. An excited closeness, necks stretched, uncomfortable poses — all this is more than compensated for by the sense of light-hearted conspiracy and collective brother- or sisterhood that lasts in real time for no more than a second, yet remains forever. Testimony from the participants adds amusing and touching details, and so our ‘Nostalgia’ acquires the format and tone of History in the widest sense.

We gaze at familiar faces, discover forgotten details. We understand that this is life as it was not long ago, yet a life that is gone forever. As an invocation for nostalgia we repeat from habit these lines from Pushkin: ‘The heart lives in tomorrow; The present is drear; All is fleeting, all passes by; All that passes will be dear’.

Sergei Nikolaevich,
Editor-in-chief
SNOB magazine