Soviet Ukrainian photography of the 1930s

The aim of the project is to collect an archive of Ukrainian vernacular photographs that came to the attention of Soviet imperial surveillance and were either destroyed (often together with their masters) or removed from their original context and filed as evidence in criminal cases prosecuted by the NKVD under the direction of the Communist Party of Ukraine. All the textual descriptions and selected images come from the archival files of residents in Soviet Ukraine who were repressed in the 1930s. They are the part of Ukrainian culture that left a void after decades of colonial rule. These are not only the traces of someone’s family photos but also the traces of the very colonial gaze that looked at these pictures, ultimately forever imprinted on them.