KGB Photography Experimentation: Turning Religion into Organized Crime

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.

—Susan Sontag, On Photography

The Soviet secret police made a habit of photographing their targets and visually capturing what was meant to be evidence of their crimes. “The improvement of photography opens up a diversity of new opportunities for its use in criminal investigation, both for the fixation of a crime scene and for undertaking the most complicated investigation, otherwise impossible to realize by other means,” states a 1935 textbook on Soviet criminalistics.¹ Soviet police manuals carefully elaborated the use of photography in crime investigation, instructing how to produce photographs of criminals and how to capture scenes and traces of crime: murdered body, arson, firearm traces, blood, sperm, footprints, cigarette butts, and so on. Police photo labs produced mug shots of suspects in custody, while field officers took photos of crime scenes and criminal evidence in addition to relevant shots in Committee for State Security (KGB) prisons and courts.² The KGB also used photography in “agent-operational measures,” deploying concealed cameras to conduct surveillance and to document intercepted or confiscated materials. In doing all this, KGB photographers were formally abiding by the standard procedures of judicial or investigative photography first developed in Europe in the late 19th century and then elaborated in detail in Soviet police manuals.³ Whereas criminalistics manuals and KGB internal instructions claimed the pursuit of justice, professionalism, and objectivity, political crimes were far more difficult to capture in photos, thus leaving secret police officers room for creativity and manipulation.

Photographs were often subject to manipulation through techniques such as montage, cropping, overlapping, retouching, or collaging. Confiscated images, art, manuscripts, and personal photographs were also redeployed for the organs’ own documentary purposes, such as when the KGB cropped and pasted images of this sort into its own photo albums and collages or reprinted them in its instructional media or propaganda publications. Regardless of where they came from, all the varied visual materials that found their way into KGB hands were forced to bend to a single dominant interpretation.⁴ Their purpose was to advance the cause of Soviet justice by exposing criminality, proving guilt, and keeping watch on suspected offenders.

KGB photography, however, was much more than just a tool of crime work. Unlike classic forensic and judicial photography, photographs produced by the KGB were often far from reflecting or upholding the principles of accuracy or objectivity. Whereas Soviet official documentation advocated the triumphal revelation of the truth, the images located in the former KGB archives show how intentional photography manipulation generated different photographic meanings and concealed the inherent violence. In that sense, the statement “what you can’t see, you can’t photograph” has little relevance when it comes to the work of the Soviet secret police. But does this mean that the images of suspects and manipulation of police photography that we see below were mere falsification? The distinction between the KGB photograph and Soviet reality was more complicated and awkward than a yes or no answer can capture. Inscribed with ideological presumptions, the Soviet secret police photograph was neither an objective documentation of the truth nor a simple falsification, but rather an instrument designed to produce and transmit a discourse of truth—or what John Tagg calls, following Foucault, “the régime of photographic truth,” whose aim was not merely to advance the KGB’s case but to shape the image of the class or national enemy.⁵ As Tagg continues, discussing the institutional use of photography as evidence in 19th-century Western Europe, “here, the knowledge and truth of which photography became the guardian were inseparable from the power and control that they engendered.”⁶ In this regard, KGB photography appeared as a material “force field” that was at the same time the product of the state machine and an element in the technologies of knowledge production—the technologies that, according to Ann Stoler, reproduced the state itself.⁷ What Roland Barthes has called the “evidential force...