Oldal 354 [354]
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 im¬
age 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 resi¬
dential 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 inde¬
pendent 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 busi¬
nessmen), 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).