When he spoke he fired imaginary shots with his gun-shaped hands (Когда он говорил, он производил воображаемые выстрелы своими руками в форме пистолета) is an archive of Soviet soldiers’ photographs, assembled over thirteen years by Edgar Martins, the Archive of Modern Conflict (UK) and two close friends, a Ukrainian and a Russian collector who remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. Their parents fought on the same side; now their nations are at war. The irony is so acute that it becomes part of the subject.
Made between the 1940s and 1980s, the photographs look past the battlefield to the long wait before it. Men play at violence, with mock executions, hands cocked into pistols and gestures poised between jest and menace. Within that play, something quieter surfaces: a hand on a shoulder, a glance held too long, bodies closer than any order required. Where intimacy between men was criminalised, horseplay became the only language available to desire and care.
Completed in the shadow of the 2022 invasion, the book prints these images across the pages of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don, the novel in which they were smuggled out of Russia, so that photograph and text overwrite one another.
