For an Exploration of Visual Resources of the History of Imprisonment

The article analyses still and moving pictures taken in prisons and corrective camps in Soviet Union between 1930s–1970s. Penal and Justice State institutions of the Soviet Union frequently appealed to film-makers and photographers in order to create the pedagogic and communication medium. An unexplored corpus of visual documents fabricated within this framework and including training films (for prison guards, e.g.), promotional films and photo-albums, is placed here in the analytic perspective of useful photo and film. The paper examines firstly the diversity of visual conceptions of the imprisonment, the manner that the images shape the gaze of penal institutions, their workers and the authorities which order these pictures. Secondly, the paper approaches the issue of purposes and usages of the visual documents by institutions, as a well as by convicts. In this light, the picture of imprisonment will be positioned as an element of the flux between liberty and confinement. The article compares 3 collections of hitherto unseen or insufficiently explored Soviet documents: photo-albums and films of prisons created to order of the Ministries of Justice and of Internal Affairs (1930–1950); photographs taken by employees of a penal colony aside from ministerial command between 1940 and 1970 and those created by the prisoners semi-legally. The first corpus originates from the archives of the Penal administration. The second one is gathered by the author of the paper in a penal colony in Urals. The third one stems from the archives collected by the research team ‘Sound archives of Gulag’. The paper puts into practice an original analysis, combining visual exams and study of social practice of the image. It examines and historicises the fabrication of these films and photos, their usages by guards, prisoners and penal institutions, as well as their perception. It highlights the migration of discursive and aesthetic motifs between institutional and private images. Within a contrastive approach, the author proceeds to an analytical junction of Soviet documents with the photos and films made in Western places of confinement.