Glacial Errata, No. 37

[Editor’s Note: Many months back, an issue of Glacial Errata featured a photograph from The Harlem Book of the Dead, a collection of funerary photographs by James Van Der Zee, edited by Camille Billops and with poetry by Owen Dodson. When I was collecting various “books of the dead,” I tracked down a long out of print copy that I paid quite a lot for, knowing it was worth every penny. But I was happy to discover last week in a bookstore that it’s back in print! I cannot impress upon you all how amazing this book is; I’d definitely grab a copy while you can. More info here.]

Five

(from L to R: Nikolai Antipov, Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov, Nikolai Shvernik, and Nikolai Komarov in Leningrad, 1926. Stalin had just made Kirov first secretary of the Leningrad party.)

Four

(from L to R: Nikolai Antipov, Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov, and Nikolai Shvernik, in Leningrad, 1936. In a photo album from 1936. Komarov was expelled from the Communist Party in 1937, and executed in November of that year.)

Three

(from L to R: Joseph Stalin, Sergei Kirov, and Nikolai Shvernik, from the 1940 publication History of the USSR. Antipov had since been sent to Orel prison, where he was shot on August 24, 1941.)

Two

(from L to R: Joseph Stalin and Sergei Kirov, from the publication Joseph Stalin—A Short Biography, 1949. Shvernik, surprisingly, remained in Stalin’s good graces; it is not clear why he was removed from this photo.)

One

(Joseph Stalin, oil painting by Isaak Brodsky, undated. Kirov had been assassinated in 1934; his death was used by Stalin as a pretense to conduct show trials and purge the governement of his enemies.)

These images and accompanying information come from David King’s 1997 book, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia, a book that is depressingly as timely as ever. As King writes in his introduction, “Skillful photographic retouching for reproduction depended, like any craft before the advent of computer technology, on the skill of the person carrying out the task and the time she or he had to complete it. But why was the standard of retouching in Soviet books and journals often so crude? Did the Stalinists want their readers to see that elimination had taken place, as a fearful and ominous warning? Or could the slightest trace of an almost vanished commissar, deliberately left behind by the retoucher, become a ghostly reminder that the repressed might yet return?”

Aside from publishing The Commissar Vanishes, which remains an absolutely vital book for the history of photography, King had an amazing career as a graphic designer, working as an editor for the Sunday Times Magazine as well as doing freelance design for books, albums, and CDs. If you want to know more, Josh MacPhee wrote a great appreciation for Lapham’s Quarterly in 2017, a year after King’s death (there’s also a very in-depth website with much more of his work). Perhaps his most well known work are the covers for Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love and The Who Sells Out (both done with his collaborator Roger Law), but he had a fierce and longstanding commitment to anti-fascist, anti-apartheid, and anti-racist work. It’s hard to pick just one of the many great images he made over his career, so we’ll end with two of them, both of them also unfortunately still somewhat timely.