The Mug Shot and the Close-Up: Identification and Visual Pedagogy in Secret Police Film

Among the new directions in the study of secret police archives in Russia and Eastern Europe, we notice an emerging preoccupation with the visual. This article is part of a research effort to grapple with the long-overlooked visual aspects of secret police archives, with a particular attention to film. It investigates the entanglement of policing and cinema in their uses of visual identification strategies, with a focus on the relationship between the mug shot and the close-up. I argue that in grappling with the visual aspects of the secret police archives, we are missing the point if we just look at the images themselves. These images were embedded in particular ways of seeing, deciphering, and interpreting, which they were further tasked to teach their viewers through what I designate as their visual pedagogy. The main concern of this visual pedagogy was to teach citizens how to look at and, I will argue, through each other to see the “hostile elements” hiding behind apparently innocent faces. The litmus test of this visual pedagogy was the face, and cinema and policing collaborated in teaching citizens to distrust visual appearances and see through the internal enemies hiding in their midst. Without identifying and understanding this visual pedagogy, we run the risk of seeing only the tip of the iceberg of these visual collections. The bibliography on the visual aspects of secret police archives is still limited, but it is growing. Some highlights are the online Hidden Galleries created by a team of researchers headed by James Kapaló, as well as the related exhibits and exhibit catalogue; the online exhibit Beauty in Hell: Culture in the Gulag, organized by Andrea Gullotta and The Hunterian; Tatiana Vagramenko’s work on the visual records produced by the secret police during surveillance and investigation of religious groups; Aglaya Glebova’s short but provocative article “A Visual History of the Gulag in Ten Theses”; and