An Implied Atrocity:
The Photographs of the Romanov Sisters

There are thousands of photographs taken by Tsar Nicholas II and his family, especially his daughters. Like children do, they photographed at random, in an awkward and personal way. Most of it came out smudged, crooked. Against my will I am forced to think about the labor-intensive process of developing film, of storing it, transporting the archives with you wherever you go. Who was doing all of this? Who was paying for it? These pictures are not ‘professional’, they are smudged, the horizon is crooked. A lot of them seem accidental, like showing part of an empty doorway. I remember running around with a camera my parents gave me when I was a child. The pictures I took then were similar. These photos probably serve no purpose other than entertaining the whims of a child. Unlike most of their subjects, the Romanovs had the money and the time for such an expensive hobby.*

All of these photos were originaly uploaded to imgur by a user named Andrei Goncharik. Thank you Andrei.

According to the imgur uploader, these photos were taken between 1908 and 1917. The Empire was sending its half-literate populace to die in a war, tearing itself apart internally with hunger and political violence. But these images do not feel entirely peaceful either. They are somehow stuck, purgatory like, a sort of oblivion. Maybe it’s the blindingly white sky, or the endless plain, perfectly even as far as the eye can see. Everyone is always impeccably dressed, in white skirts and sailor’s caps, so white they sometimes dissolve in the sky above them. The world is overblown and soft. It feels like a hot summer day on a plain, coveted by warm winds. Winds throwing white dust into the air. A day when you don’t have to do anything, a day that feels like it will never end.
The camera angles feel personal. We get up close, we look from below, we twist and turn between adult bodies trying to get a better look. We are a royal child — one aristocrats don’t have to notice and servants have to tolerate. What do we see? An endless repetition of military parades and banquets. The aristocracy, the servants and the soldiers.
Most aristocrats look so bored. They lean on walls; they hide their faces from the sun. They stand, with nothing to put their hands to. The faces of the entourage are indistinguishable from one another, while the soldiers are a row of black rectangles with white dots for their heads, lining the horizon. Officers on horseback, in full regalia, ride on past them into nothing, with absent looks on their faces. ‘We are all very used to doing this’, they say. Some people pose for the photos. The aristocrats look annoyed, knowing a child probably won’t take a good picture. Or they grimace, happily playing along.

Here's a link to one of these photos.

But the soldiers and the maids look startled. It all feels awkward, like when you take a picture of someone without asking them first. Are they scared? Unable to say no?
Positioned on the sidelines of the frame, in passing, the servants look directly into the camera. In the movies of Alexey German, certain side characters, mostly the children and the ‘feeble minded’, notice the camera moving among them, and follow it with a look, but never an action. They are the ones not (yet) firmly rooted in reality, in living itself, and so they observe reality from afar, with a certain detachment, and notice ‘history’ moving among them.
I think the servants are confused as to why they are being photographed. What for? Who would ever look at thousands of these pictures? Did the Grand Duchess imagine herself revisiting them after getting married off to some faraway country, flipping through them to remember her childhood? Did she think about this at all? I know I didn’t, when I ran around with a camera in my grandmother’s backyard.

Here's a link to one of these photos.

It all — all of this, has the air of an extensive apparatus, a many-armed, many-legged machine of servants, maids-of-honor, officers, horses, cooks, all moving in stellar formations from place to place, from one mansion to another, under a blinding sun, doing nothing, or nothing but their duty, dying of a sweet kind of boredom and looking very good. The living, the painful colliding of the masses, knotted stomachs and outstretched tongues, mingling together trying to create something new, tearing at each other in different directions, all of that is happening somewhere else entirely, if happening at all. And when they finally break in, as a record of time passing, their clothes dripping with snow, and sticky, viscous dirt of a reddish color, they will look around and see all of it, and then — who can blame them?

*I want to note that I'm not entirely sure if all of these were taken by children, but certainly a large number of them were. The uploader grouped them based on whose album the pictures were found in. Sometimes the same picture appears in two different albums, one belonging to the child and the other belonging to some adult companion of the Romanovs.