Soviet Photography Documentary Film: Antonia Miejluk

About the Soviet Photography Documentary Film

This Soviet photography documentary film was made for Durham University’s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, one of three profile films made alongside a wider film about the Durham Leverhulme Doctoral Training Programme in Visual Culture. It follows historian Antonia Miejluk, who completed her Leverhulme funded PhD at Durham in 2023, researching a body of photographic material that had barely been studied before.

Nine Albums and a Hidden History

At the centre of this Soviet photography documentary film is a body of material Miejluk’s thesis looks at closely: nine snapshot photograph albums made by individuals and groups in 1930s Russia, ordinary photographs taken in people’s own leisure time rather than for any official purpose. As she explains in the film, the material had simply never been looked at closely.

As I started my research, it became clear that there was this wealth of photographic material, specifically vernacular photographic material, people’s own photographs and their own albums, that had not actually been looked at really by anyone, as far as I’m aware.

The albums continue habits of leisure and photography that existed before the revolution, while the way people assembled them also speaks to wider Soviet artistic and cultural discourse. Miejluk describes what that reveals.

The way that they’re putting these albums together also speaks to Soviet artistic and cultural discourses. So actually looking at the albums themselves, you’re seeing a very different history of Russia that has been sort of hidden, I suppose, by the particular approach that certain scholarship has taken in the past.

An Interdisciplinary Home at CVAC

Miejluk was drawn to Durham’s Centre for Visual Arts and Culture (CVAC) for the way it brought scholars from very different fields into the same conversation.

I was drawn to Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Culture by the way that it brings together scholars across disciplines who are all interested in visual culture from different perspectives. My research is very interdisciplinary, so having that interaction with and dialogue with scholars working across disciplines, geography, literature, and even into the sciences, pushes me and challenges me to look at my work in ways that are perhaps outside of my own disciplinary training.

A Cohort to Lean On

Doctoral research is often solitary work, and Miejluk is candid about what the wider cohort meant to her through the isolation that can come with it.

I think one of the biggest challenges of the PhD has been the independent work, and I suppose the isolation of that, and it’s just been invaluable to have that network of PhD students to go through the whole experience with. We definitely work very collaboratively as both a sort of academic network as well as a pastoral network, drawing that together and learning from each other and sharing successes and sharing our difficulties.

Guidance from Ludmilla Jordanova

Throughout the programme, Miejluk worked closely with CVAC’s founding director, Professor Ludmilla Jordanova, whose own reflections on the programme feature in the accompanying summary film.

The programme director, Ludmilla Jordanova, has been working with us from the very start to the end and regularly checks in on us. So to have someone so knowledgeable about visual culture to talk to you about work has been incredibly valuable, and has really pushed me to think about how I use conceptual terms. I have never been more aware of how I’m using language, but it has also been a real pastoral support.

What She Took From the Programme

This Soviet photography documentary film closes where Miejluk’s research now sits. She completed her PhD in 2023 and is now Lecturer in Photographic History at De Montfort University, having previously taught at Durham and the University of Derby. Her research on the interwar Soviet photograph album continues in a chapter she contributed to Where Words and Images Meet, edited by Ludmilla Jordanova and Florence Grant.

I think my training with the Leverhulme programme has encouraged me to be more adaptable in my work and how I think about it, and to view myself within a much broader community that extends beyond my discipline. So going into the future, I hope to take that sense of collaboration and ambition, in the sense that by looking outside of our own fields, we can gain a lot more.