TY - JOUR
T1 - Presence without identification
T2 - Vicarious photography and postcolonial figuration in belarus
AU - Oushakine, Serguei Alex
N1 - Funding Information:
* I want to thank Yve-Alain Bois, Natalija Arlauskaite, Alexei Golubev, Igal Halfin, Angelina Lucento, Olga Shevchenko, Kim Lane Scheppele, Perry Sherouse, and the Postcolonial Humanities Working Group at Princeton for their comments on the earlier drafts of this article. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues from Belarus, without whom I would have never discovered the Minsk School. My special gratitude goes to Igor Savchenko, Sergey Kozhemyakin, Vladimir Shakhlevich, Galina Moskaleva, and Vladimir Parfenok for sharing their time and work with me. The fieldwork for this research was funded by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 October Magazine, Ltd.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - A man in a military uniform poses for the camera. He stands in a corner of an open terrace located somewhere high in the mountains. One of the man’s hands firmly holds the terrace’s railing; the other rests casually on his waist. Slightly off-center, the vertical of the officer’s body is counterbalanced by the horizontal rows of bars. Far below, a sea merges with the sky. The portrait would have been a typical memento from a summer resort, except for one crucial detail: The officer has no head, for the figure is cropped tight across the shoulders. Despite this violent erasure of the subject, the photograph is disturbingly serene, and the officer, though headless, exudes confidence and even a sense of control.
AB - A man in a military uniform poses for the camera. He stands in a corner of an open terrace located somewhere high in the mountains. One of the man’s hands firmly holds the terrace’s railing; the other rests casually on his waist. Slightly off-center, the vertical of the officer’s body is counterbalanced by the horizontal rows of bars. Far below, a sea merges with the sky. The portrait would have been a typical memento from a summer resort, except for one crucial detail: The officer has no head, for the figure is cropped tight across the shoulders. Despite this violent erasure of the subject, the photograph is disturbingly serene, and the officer, though headless, exudes confidence and even a sense of control.
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U2 - 10.1162/octo_a_00323
DO - 10.1162/octo_a_00323
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85058678284
SN - 0162-2870
VL - 164
SP - 49
EP - 88
JO - October
JF - October
ER -