The Shepeliuk Archive: Re-examining Ukrainian Industrial Heritage Through Soviet Photojournalism

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The Oleksii Shepeliuk archive is the focus of this PhD, which will examine Ukrainian industrial photographic practice. The archive has never been studied and will provide critical insights into Soviet-era industrial history and heritage, which exists today in a grey zone between abandonment and extinction. Oleksii Shepeliuk was a photographer and editor for the Kyiv Lepse Factory newspaper from 1963-1970. His corpus of work, consisting of photography, journalism and accompanying notes, offers a rare glimpse into the practices of industrial self-documentation, a little-studied area of Soviet Ukrainian visual and cultural history. My PhD will examine Shepeliuk's photographic archive alongside analysis of his texts, including his thesis, written in Ukrainian at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and entitled "Photo-Reportage - An Incisive Weapon of Propaganda. To contextualise this material, I will interview former factory workers and their families, and compare the Lepse archives with institutions such as Darnytskyi Sewing Plant and Kyiv Motorcycle Factory. These archival collections are digitally accessible via the "Un/Archiving Post/Industry" project. Finally, Shepeliuk's photography will also be compared with industrial documentation projects by non-Soviet photographers, such as Margaret Bourke-White's 'Eyes on Russia' (1931) and the Franki Raffles project 'Women in the USSR' (1989). Critically, in the course of this research, I will catalogue and digitise Shepeliuk's archive, making it publicly accessible through the Urban Media Archive.The full-scale invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the extreme precarity (deindustrialization, defunding, decommunization, and now war) of many archives and heritage collections in Ukraine, which is today facing atrocious violence at the hands of the Russian army. Parts of the Shepeliuk archive were lost during the Russian occupation of Donetsk in 2014, including the photographer's original cameras, lenses, photo laboratory tools, and journals containing film development formulas. This research is therefore critical to preserve and analyse the remaining parts of the collection. This project requires that I develop several skills, which St Andrews is well-equipped to provide training in. As a PhD student, I will access the GRADskills programme of workshops that will provide foundational training in data handling. I have some experience of digital archiving, but I will need specific training in the processing of a large, personal archive. My hope is that Shepeliuk's archive can be ultimately made digitally available to other researchers. Therefore, it is imperative that the material is logically handled and catalogued from the outset. My project also requires training in handling of photographic archives.The SGSAH Culture and Heritage Discipline+ Catalyst will be critical for engaging conversations around digitisation, public memory and heritage preservation, central to my research. The SGSAH Citizen, Culture, and Ethics hub, based at St Andrews and led by Modern Languages researcher, Tom Smith, will enable consideration of ethical questions of researching the family archive. Furthermore, I will seek SGSAH Cohort Development Funding for an Innovative Training Event workshop dedicated to the digitization of family photo-archives and at-risk heritage preservation. A three-month SGSAH Visiting Doctoral Research position at the Center for Urban History in Lviv would further enable valuable hands-on training in digitising vulnerable archives.