From a Pine Tree to a Telegraph Pole. The Photojournalism of Iryna Pap

In order to construct a shared identity that eventually consolidates and legiti- mizes certain groups and communities, people may often resort to history and collective memory as viable tools. Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, but more intensely after the Revolution of Dignity in 2013–14, Ukrainian society has paved its way into the future by confronting and reinterpreting the official Soviet histo- rical narrative. In 2015, Ukraine opened its Soviet-era KGB archives as part of the “Decommunization” laws aimed at cleansing public spaces of Soviet symbolism, uncovering and restoring historical facts that were hushed up in the Soviet era. This movement has nothing to do with the absolutization of the role of the past in the present. Instead, the emphasis is placed on the past as a frame of reference on which common values and patterns of behavior are based, allies are sought, and models of development are determined. The body of photographic work produced by Iryna Pap (1917–1985), which doc- uments life in the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic in 1957–72, must therefore be examined through this exploration of a highly contested past and through the way it projects into the country’s present and future. The portion of Pap’s works currently available for examination comes from the Kyiv editorial office of Izvestia. Other traces of Pap’s work for local media outlets and other elements of her production for Izvestia may also be found in two Kyivian archives: the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) and the Pshenychnyi Central State CinePhotoPhono Archive of Ukraine. The photographs published in Izvestia are most likely held in the newspaper’s archive in Moscow. The ongoing war makes it temporarily impossible to access these archives.