The Commissar Vanishes offers a chilling look at how one man - Joseph Stalin - manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several Party members disappeared from an official photograph, to be replaced by a sylvan glade. For the past three decades, author and photohistorian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of photographs, posters, and paintings from the Soviet era. His collection has grown to more than a quarter of a million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes.…
"This book is intriguing because it’s not focusing on something that happens in our mind. It is about what others do to our externalised memory. Photographs, books and letters are all part of that. But, as we realise that our own recollection isn’t that perfect and begin to rely on these, we may become quite dependent on the authenticity of these objects as pieces of (our) memory. In this book David King looks at Soviet photoshopping. Whenever someone in official photos fell from grace he or she was manually retouched from the photographs. Dozens of people were airbrushed out of history. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As we externalise our memories and put stuff up on Flickr, Facebook and YouTube, these companies will have the power to change our history. And it is easier than in Stalin’s times. Because, unfortunately, digital memories are much more malleable than analogue memories, and digital changes are harder to detect. In fact, a US colleague of mine told me that in the medical field peer reviewers of academic journals now struggle with digital photos that have been digitally altered."
