Pictures From a Past

Lots of people find old family photos when cleaning out the attic. Check out this article at Mother Jones, which offers a glimpse of Asya Ivashintsova-Melkumyan's find of roughly 30,000.

Her mother, Masha Ivashintsova, had been an avid photographer but had never displayed her work. Given that most of Ivashintova's pictures were of life in the Soviet Union from about 1960 on, and given that the Soviets were at best ambivalent about any version of chronicling that life other than they one they put out, most of the pictures had never been seen.

Ivashintsova-Melkumyan is digitizing the negatives and pictures she found, which apparently cover roughly the last forty years of the 20th century. Ivashintsova continued shooting even though she was deemed mentally ill by the Soviet government and spent many years going in and out of the USSR's "mental health system." Her crime was not being able to keep a job. For this, she was given the choice between a prison term or involuntary commitment to a "psychiatric care facility." A decade of Soviet mental health treatment more or less broke Ivashintsova, her daughter said, which might be a good thing to remember if you get ideas about how Communist rule was just a way of guaranteeing human rights, only from a different perspective.