Review by Hans Hickerson ·
No wonder many photographers have given up using photography to hunt down and capture individual images of things seen in the world. Today with photobook publishing so accessible photographers have other possibilities. Exploring your past, for example. Or your family relationships. Or a particular historical time and place. Or, as is the case for Xenia Nikolskaya’s The House My Grandfather Built, all of the above. In a book like this, we are not viewing an album of individual artistic works. Like other books built the same way, Nikolskaya’s becomes a container for long-form thematic development and exploration backed by texts and ordinary, uninflected, straight photographs.
In The House My Grandfather Built Nikolskaya tells the story of her grandfather and his house, but also the story of her mother and her own story, or at least part of it. Along the way she delves into the reality of exile in Siberia in Stalinist times in the former Soviet Union.
Nikolskaya grew up fatherless, and her grandfather played an important role in her life, even though he died when she was 2 ½ years old. Interestingly, she reports that at that time family history was not shared, and she learned her grandfather’s story only years later when she read his memoir.
Her grandfather spent 20 years in the Gulag in Siberia and when he returned to Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) he built the house referred to in the title. Nikolskaya shows us the house, in the small town of Pribytkovo, in contemporary color as well as in faded monochrome photographs. We see the garden and exterior views, and we go inside the living room, dining room, and kitchen. We see details such as her grandfather’s old typewriter, her mother’s first doll, and a raincoat her grandmother wore in Siberia.
Nikolskaya layers texts, documents, and vintage and contemporary photographs to bring her story to life. She includes the 2012 train trip she made with her mother to visit the lonely Siberian mining outposts where her grandparents worked and where her mother was born and raised. We see images of train travel, desolate landscapes, and places her grandparents lived and worked, including several pairings of contemporary photos and vintage images of the same place.
Done well, like The House My Grandfather Built, photobooks are more than the sum of their parts. They take us places and offer us experiences we wouldn’t otherwise have. Viewing Nikolskaya’s book we marvel at her fascinating story of resilience, survival, and devotion, and we are grateful she believed it should be told. Like when we make a new friend, we feel enriched. We have been connected to another piece of the world we did not know.
Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.
PhotoBook Journal previously reviewed Nikolskaya’s Plastic Jesus.
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Xenia Nikolskaya – The House My Grandfather Built
Photographer: Xenia Nikolskaya (Russian-Swedish, born 1973, lives in Cairo)
Publisher: Nikolskaya-Lund Publishing, Stockholm
Language: English
Text: Xenia Nikolskaya
Design: Amparo Baquerizas
Printing: Livonia Print
Hardcover; open spine Swiss binding; 22×15 cm; 96 pages; ISBN 978-91-519-4664-1
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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.
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