Portrait of the Target Audience of Photographic «Publics» with Images of Russian Despair (Done in a Creative Format of a Documentary Film )

In the 20th century national identity used to be a tool to unite people around the Communist Party’s ideology which consolidated the masses for decades. In the USSR an individual’s dependence on collective identity was determined by their involvement in collective ideology which had ‘a set of core symbolic elements that served as a certain ‘proof of truth’ for the people’1. Therefore, we can conclude that following the Soviet Union’s collapse people were and still are experiencing a deep crisis of collective identity which in its turn results in the lack of self-identity and is reflected in artistic works of those in search of the lost identity. This work is to demonstrate the interest shown by millennials to the images of despair through the photographing post-Soviet space and the representation of images of despair in photographic publics about Russia.