The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography in the Soviet Union
The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography in the Soviet Union
The Missing Picture: Alternative Contemporary Photography in the Soviet Union, Katy Kline, ed. December 8, 1990 – February 3, 1991, List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Vladimir Kupreanov, Ilya Piganov, Maria Serebrjakova, and Alexey Shulgin (group exhibition)
Texts: Katy Kline, Tatiana Salzirn, and JP Jacob
Jacob travelled to the Soviet Union the first time in 1986. He and Katy Kline, director of the LVAC at MIT, agreed that, depending on what opportunities he encountered there, he might guest-curate a subsequent exhibition of Soviet photography. Jacob initially planned to organize a survey exhibition, mirroring his work on Out of Eastern Europe. That plan was ultimately scrapped, in part due to the vast geographic expanse of the USSR and the difficulty of travel for a foreigner. More significantly, the exhibition sought to respond to the sweeping and unexpected changes taking place in the USSR at the very moment Jacob was working there.
Jacob returned to the USSR three times, in 1988, 1989, and 1990. During each subsequent visit he witnessed changes that, in 1986, would have been unthinkable. Jacob resolved that the exhibition should be about the reciprocal impact of those changes on photography; a historical moment both shaping photography and being shaped by photographs. Unlike others responding to change in the USSR from within institutions or from abroad, Jacob was already on the ground. He was known to the photographers, and trusted as a peer. It was this unique confluence, and the fact that the history of Soviet photography was known to the West, that allowed Jacob to convince both the photographers and the LVAC to do something wholly unexpected.
When it opened in 1990, The Missing Picture presented a one-person exhibition of photographs by Michailov, then little known outside the USSR. It was the introduction of Michailov’s work in the US as a mid-career retrospective, and would be transformative for him. The Missing Picture also presented a group exhibition of four young Soviet photographers inspired by Michailov: Vladimir Kupreanov, Ilya Piganov, Maria Serebrjakova, and Alexey Shulgin.
The AAM prize winning design of the exhibition catalogue read in two directions, one for Michailov and one for the group exhibition.
