The Empty Chair. On the role of personal narratives in memory work

At Les Rencontres d'Arles 2026, at the round table "Writing memory: family narratives and personal testimony in photobooks", the Auditorium hall of the National School of Photography in Arles is almost full. There are five of us. Caron Toshiko and Andi Ari Setiadi from Indonesia, who help people deal with trauma by making photobooks. Henri Airo, who researched drunk driving in Finland through the tragic death of his younger sister. And two Russians: Nata Drachinskaya, whose father worked for the KGB and killed himself in 2001, and me, whose father was born in ALZhIR, the Akmolinsk camp for wives of traitors to the Motherland.

Two months earlier, Anna Aicher, our moderator (and a photographer herself), told me there would be a Ukrainian photographer on the panel. By the time we gathered in Arles, he had declined. His absence was quiet, but it became the context we were speaking in. It is the part of the discussion I have thought about most since.

What all of us brought to that table were private stories used to open public ones. My book and Nata's are the most "historical" of the five, in the sense that most of what they describe happened in the 20th century in the Soviet Union. But neither of us made a book about the past. We were researching what that era is still doing to people now.

I am not a historian

I should say this early, because it changes what the following is worth. I am not a historian. I am an artist. My book, Motherland hears, Motherland knows, has two parts. The first and the main one is a photobook: the story is told almost entirely through images I took during the trips we took together with my father. The second gathers captions, letters, documents and other historical materials. It is not a research. The materials are supplementary to the main part of the book, and the main language is visual. Historians establish what happened; artists, at their best, make people able to stand near it. The second job is not a lesser version of the first.

What a personal story gives you access to

One of the situations that pushed me to start the project happened in 2019, when I was teaching photography at a secondary school in Moscow. It was a lecture on Soviet photographers, including those repressed after the Second World War, and it turned out my students had never heard of the Gulag. At that time the topic was not as marginalised in Russia as it is now, so it could be they knew at least something about repressions but I think it had simply been one more boring subject in a history lesson. That was when I understood that my project could build a language to speak about repression – not only through archives, but through contemporary presence: photographing the places of repression as they are now, and photographing my father in the places of his trauma. Later, in 2023, when I was no longer teaching in Russia, I brought a draft of the project to Moscow for a closed, guest-list-only exhibition. Several of my former students came and spent a long time studying the book, discovering the reality of this history through my personal story. That was the first time I truly felt that seeing this project through to the end had not been in vain.

There was a very practical sense for this too. When we travelled, "I was born here" or "my father was born here" worked one hundred per cent better than "I am researching the topic". People opened doors and their own memories for a father and a daughter in a way they would not have for a researcher. A personal claim on a place is a key: that is not sentiment, it is access.

I hesitate to say a personal narrative is simply stronger than an outside one – outside witnesses matter enormously, and I would not want a world where documentarians only photograph their own families. But it does something an outside witness cannot, and it is worth naming what.

The price is subjectivity, and the price is the point

Of course a personal narrative brings subjectivity into the memory of repression. We discussed this in Vienna at Dialogbüro last October and I have not changed my position since then: without that subjectivity the history of repression would not be full. There are parts of the story my father ignored, or could not find the strength to face. There is a version in which my grandmother was NOT arrested because of my grandfather. My father would not listen to it. His mother was the only parent he trusted.

My goal was not to interrupt and not to argue with his version, but to listen to his story to the end and to make it visible. What a person cannot say is information. A refusal is a document. If you edit it out in order to produce a cleaner account, you have removed the very evidence of how deep the damage goes.

Form: how not to make a poster

There is a real question about what visual forms politically engaged work can take. In fact, that was the exact topic of another discussion I took part in during the festival, hosted at the Librairie du Palais. I sat alongside artists tackling monumental, systemic issues through complex documentary forms: the violent appropriation of indigenous heritage in Colombia (Mama Coca), the cycles of violence and forced exile in South Lebanon (The Circular Ruins), and the exploitation of migrant labor during Oman’s economic transition (Ashes of the Arabian's Pearl).

None of these projects were built on intimate family histories. To tell their stories, the authors used hacked emails, biochemical charts, reversed films, and inventories of abandoned labor camps. Yet, despite our different methods, we were all wrestling with the exact same challenge: how to make political work that does not become a simple poster.

I do not use heavy conceptualisation or experimental techniques in my practice, but even inside a strict documentary format, there are ways to tell a story that demand more from the viewer than a slogan does.

In my book, the pictures are organised so that a photograph of the administrative building of Karlag stands together with my father lying on a couch. The courtyard of the choral school where he studied – where he sang "Motherland hears, Motherland knows", the song he once performed in front of Stalin as a member of the leading Soviet boys' choir – stands together with his naked back in 2020. The title of the book is that song. A slogan tells you what to think. A sequence makes you do the work yourself, and what you arrive at, you keep.

This is what artists add to material that has often already been reported. Eugenia Maximova's Silent River follows the city of Ruse in Bulgaria and the tragic death of her sister-in-law, a murdered journalist. To convey the weight of this murder and make a profound statement about the state of civil society in her country, Maximova uses a deeply lyrical visual language, capturing the local landscapes on a medium-format film camera. The case was covered by media across Europe; the book reaches somewhere the coverage did not. Nastassja Nefjodov works almost entirely from her own family: "My family seems to collect stories of war. And I continue to do so. I grew up on the front line of the Cold War with a West German mother, a Russian father and two grandfathers who fought against each other during World War II." Who tells that, if not their granddaughter?

What daughters do not say

For both Nata and me there was a question we did not fully answer in our books: we can tell our fathers' stories because we were among the closest people to them, but do we say openly what it was like to be their daughters? I left that out of my book. It would have added another layer to a narrative that was already multi-layered enough.

I will say it here. My father decided to live an open life whatever it cost him. He told people he had been born in a camp, before and after the USSR collapsed. He was against any lie and often looked like a man fighting every form of dictatorship. Yet his own family frequently reminded me of a small Russia. Because his harsh behaviour was routinely excused by his difficult past, there was a quiet rule that his pain took precedence. I hid a great many small things in order not to disappoint him. A man so consumed by his own history often struggles to hear the present. Whenever I tried to bring him my own life, I found he already had his own conclusions.

Nata's book is built in two volumes: one about her father as a father, one about her father as a KGB cryptographer. In the family part she quotes him: "Dad had a saying about 'family regulations'. He repeated it often. His charter consisted of only two points: 1. Dad is always right. 2. If Dad is wrong, refer to point 1."

Neither of us writes about our fathers being open in personal life. That silence in two unrelated books, by two women who met each other only because of them, seems to me worth noticing.I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to slide into a comfortable symmetry. Nata writes: "I want to show how the story of one family can reflect the story of a big country, and how vital it is to know your family's history in order to think critically." I agree with every word. But a man born inside a camp and a man who served the institution that ran the camps are not in the same position, and our books are not two halves of one balanced picture. What they share is narrower and, to me, more useful: both men learned in the same school that private life is where the rules do not have to apply, and both passed that lesson on to a daughter.

The space between us

Serhii Korovayny's book is itself made of personal narrative: archival photographs from his hometown Khartsyzk, taken between 2010 and 2014, set next to wartime Mariupol, Pokrovsk, Bakhmut and Kurakhove. "I cannot stop the advance of the Russian army," he writes. "What I can do is take pictures. This is my way to preserve memory." It is hard to file a war that is killing people this week under "memory projects" – but it is precisely his own pre-war memory that makes the work hold together.

I do not think I should be the one asking whether Russian- and Ukrainian-raised artists can share a stage in 2026. Put that way, the question quietly assigns the work to the side that is being bombed.

What I can say is what belongs on my side of it: the war against Ukraine and the repression inside Russia come out of the same apparatus, and it would not have been possible without a KGB man as president. The tradition my book describes did not end. It expanded – from Russia's own citizens to an independent country next door. That is not a historical claim. It is a present-tense one, and it is the reason a book about 1938 is not only about 1938.

Not for beginners

In documentary photography, family projects are met with a certain scepticism. Why research your own family – real documentarians go further. Even colleagues who accept such work often call it something for beginners. When I started and looked for support from older colleagues, I had two people I trusted. One said I absolutely had to do it. The other said it was a difficult topic and I should make something about youth instead.

Having finished, I can say it is definitely not for beginners. The work required patience and the ability to be four people at once: a photographer with a clear enough head to see what she came for, a travel manager finding fixers and arranging trips, a press secretary handling everyone he wanted to meet and everyone who wanted to meet him, and a daughter who did not want to hurt her father. The hardest part was not letting him direct how I worked — and his presence was the greatest thing the project had. We finished in time. He died soon after our last trip.

But the geography of this trauma extends far beyond one family’s story. My next project will explore the memory of repressions in Kazakhstan – a former Soviet republic that was essentially transformed into a massive landscape of camps, now an independent country forging its own complex approach to this past. I am currently seeking funding and institutional support for a research trip to document how disparate personal narratives coexist on this difficult territory today: the descendants of the repressed, the descendants of the guards, and the Kazakhs who returned to their ancestral lands.

None of this happens without institutions willing to carry it. I am grateful to Fotohof, who published the book, showed the work in Salzburg, and proposed the Arles discussion where I met most of the people I have quoted here. I am equally grateful to Dialogbüro; without them, none of these in-person discussions could have taken place, and the English edition could never have achieved such design and translation precision. The translator, a historian of repressions, did a colossal job refining every detail. And of course, none of this would have happened without ASoP Europe, Simon Mraz, and Dr. Helga Rabl-Stadler.

July 2026

Belgrade