In Silver
Archival photographs, inkjet prints.
This photographic series combines photographs made by my father in the 1980s and pictures made by me as a response 30 years later. The archival images from dusty crumbling black and white negatives and faded colour slides were new to me. Rolled up and kept in boxes they were forgotten as soon as the few selected darkroom prints were made. Weeks of scanning revealed photographs of family life, travels, political gatherings and everyday events in the last decade of the Soviet Union.
I am initiating a visual dialogue in 3 dimensions- over two different eras, two different geographical points and two different political regimes. To make the pictures that form my response I have sourced expired photographic films as old as the ones that my father had used.
When building this fluid visual narrative, I'm questioning and debating notions of memory, change, expectation and nostalgia. Treating the newly discovered family album as a cell in the organism of European history I extend the conversation to the present tense - I wonder what happens to fulfilled hopes and battles that have been won, and where do projections of the future go once the future is upon us.
In In Silver I weave two timelines into one - train travels across the Soviet Union happen at the same time as hiking in Scottish landscape; political gatherings provide background noise for night walks in blooming parks; the evening light fills the west facing kitchen just as a diver hits the water. There is an irregular synchronicity in both timelines - as if a piece of well used carbon paper was placed in between. A deep desire to discover life to the west of the Iron Curtain mirrors an impulsive decision to move to a country only associated with mountains and sheep until then. Two struggles for independence take place, both heavily emotional and overwhelming- one succeeds one does not. A lack of trust in, and rebellion against, the existing system prevails, yet the alternative aimed for in one time is the system in another.
Most photographs are not made with an intention to record history. The ones that do often have ulterior motives. Pictures are taken to keep a memory, to share a moment, to leave legacy, to prove and to mislead. Family albums are constructed to keep the chronological order of events, an edited version of lives with significant faces, occasions and places featured. When photograph after photograph is placed into an album (whether physical or digital) there isn't much thought of this being a record of history.
‘Oh that's just us having lunch after an independence rally.’
‘In this one your mother is holding a bottle of Pepsi Cola- those were hard to get.’
‘This is me under water, on the day the UK voted leave,’
'This is my first trip to the West, I went to Denmark.'
'And here - we just came back from a week in Poland where we were selling deficit items during the blockade.'
These dialogues speak of multiple migrations, four family members in four different countries, not always through choice. They examine the collapse of one political system and the slow agony of another. Most of this argent conversation though is spent exploring beauty, humour, colour, light, and a persistent sense of hope - possibly written in the genes, or just in silver particles as old as myself.
Archival photographs, inkjet prints.
This photographic series combines photographs made by my father in the 1980s and pictures made by me as a response 30 years later. The archival images from dusty crumbling black and white negatives and faded colour slides were new to me. Rolled up and kept in boxes they were forgotten as soon as the few selected darkroom prints were made. Weeks of scanning revealed photographs of family life, travels, political gatherings and everyday events in the last decade of the Soviet Union.
I am initiating a visual dialogue in 3 dimensions- over two different eras, two different geographical points and two different political regimes. To make the pictures that form my response I have sourced expired photographic films as old as the ones that my father had used.
When building this fluid visual narrative, I'm questioning and debating notions of memory, change, expectation and nostalgia. Treating the newly discovered family album as a cell in the organism of European history I extend the conversation to the present tense - I wonder what happens to fulfilled hopes and battles that have been won, and where do projections of the future go once the future is upon us.
In In Silver I weave two timelines into one - train travels across the Soviet Union happen at the same time as hiking in Scottish landscape; political gatherings provide background noise for night walks in blooming parks; the evening light fills the west facing kitchen just as a diver hits the water. There is an irregular synchronicity in both timelines - as if a piece of well used carbon paper was placed in between. A deep desire to discover life to the west of the Iron Curtain mirrors an impulsive decision to move to a country only associated with mountains and sheep until then. Two struggles for independence take place, both heavily emotional and overwhelming- one succeeds one does not. A lack of trust in, and rebellion against, the existing system prevails, yet the alternative aimed for in one time is the system in another.
Most photographs are not made with an intention to record history. The ones that do often have ulterior motives. Pictures are taken to keep a memory, to share a moment, to leave legacy, to prove and to mislead. Family albums are constructed to keep the chronological order of events, an edited version of lives with significant faces, occasions and places featured. When photograph after photograph is placed into an album (whether physical or digital) there isn't much thought of this being a record of history.
‘Oh that's just us having lunch after an independence rally.’
‘In this one your mother is holding a bottle of Pepsi Cola- those were hard to get.’
‘This is me under water, on the day the UK voted leave,’
'This is my first trip to the West, I went to Denmark.'
'And here - we just came back from a week in Poland where we were selling deficit items during the blockade.'
These dialogues speak of multiple migrations, four family members in four different countries, not always through choice. They examine the collapse of one political system and the slow agony of another. Most of this argent conversation though is spent exploring beauty, humour, colour, light, and a persistent sense of hope - possibly written in the genes, or just in silver particles as old as myself.
©Kotryna Ula Kiliulyte 2023 kotrynaula@gmail.com