Oldal 354 [354]
OCR
352 Eda Kalmre of that phrase, referring to the physical standpoint and also to what might be called the ‘mental standpoint of the artist" (Burke 2001: 30-31). Talking about the wartime or post-war photographers who documented their surroundings, we have to keep in mind that they must be seen both as individuals and also as members of their communities, sharing the life and destiny of their people, acting in their time. What surrounds the photos at the time they are taken is important, as are the meanings attributed to them by their contemporaries and the meanings they acquire in the future. In the following section, I point to a few aspects of dealing with documentary photos in the official Soviet information channels, and how the inhabitants of Tartu saw the historical photos: what meanings they gave to the images and what their practices were with regard to them. Photos create their own reality and truth, and the relation of both photos and narratives to social reality and truth are complicated. Nevertheless, images play an important role in marking the truth-value of things. It has been said that “on the linguistic level, ‘truth’ appears to spontaneously want to take the form of an image or picture” (Linnap 2007: 39). Juri Lotman has written about photography as a stand-in for reality (Lotman 1992: 72-73). Depicting public reality construction in news and their visual formats as bidirectional, Linnap finds that the standardised “menu for recording life events” recreates reality itself and our comprehension of reality is composed, in the end, of what we see (Linnap 2007: 41)—and also of what we hear as, for example, rumours. Post-war rumours based on stereotypical imagery had similar leverage: they were both a reality as well as a way of describing reality, and the world described in these stories was so powerful that it still has an influence on people’s memories, feelings and attitudes (Kalmre 2013: 134). Forbidden City, Forbidden Photos After the war Tartu city centre was practically in ruins, as more than half of the residential areas and about half of the industrial buildings had been destroyed. Many buildings that bore symbolic value to Estonians after their 20 years as an independent nation state (1918-1939) had been demolished by Nazi or Soviet troops, among them Vanemuine theatre, St John’s Church, St Maria’s Church, the Stone Bridge, the Trade Yard (symbolising the success of the first ethnic Estonian businessmen), and the then modern Market Building that had been completed just before the war (Fig. 149). The majority of these edifices stood in the vicinity of the open air market and the place where the alleged sausage factory—the crime scene—was situated. These buildings functioned as backdrop to the stage where the events described by my informants took place. As typical to war memoires®, the particular reality created ? Peeter Linnap uses the term “menu” to denote images and series of images that record life events. > In analysing the literary treatments of the First World War, Paul Fussell describes an approach that is based on a similar opposition (Fussell 2000).
