Piano for parts, porridge for bears, photos for Wikimedia Commons: the story of a family GLAM project

It’s hard to say when exactly my work with the home archive began. In a broad sense, it started when I inherited an apartment and began clearing it out — a place so cluttered there were only narrow paths left to walk through. Even though I often wanted to throw everything away without a second glance, the value of reusing things always won out: a moth-eaten piano was dismantled for parts, clothing and tableware went to a charity second-hand shop, 200 bars of soap and similar items simply went to charity, Soviet collected works to the nearest library, old dried apricots into porridge for bears undergoing rehabilitation at a special center for injured wild animals…

After five years of gradual sorting, I began to get my bearings in what was left; and in recent days, while “Wiki Loves Folklore 2025” was underway, I remembered that I had been setting aside and preserving a collection of embroidery made by my grandmother. Perhaps the GLAM project-style work with the archive could be counted from this point. The photographs of the embroidery were warmly received on QI — 145 photographs from the contest were recognized as quality images, 42 of them mine, including 20 of my grandmother’s embroidery. However, the contest organizers made no note of this fact, which was a bit disheartening, though it didn’t stop me from uploading photographs of more embroidery after the contest ended.

Another possible starting point came several years ago: Ekaterina told Nikolai she had photographs she had taken in her teenage, stored as slides. After that, the user group acquired a scanner for working on similar tasks, which sat unused for a some time until I persuaded Ekaterina to give me both the slides and the scanner. Ekaterina’s archive was scanned quickly and whetted my appetite — I remembered that, while clearing out things, I had seen slides and negatives, and decided it was their turn. The color slides I scanned myself; the negatives I sent to a professional center. This could have been the end of the archival work — as it happened, I didn’t have any external funding, but I also didn’t want to postpone the project, and I had the means to pay for scanning 145 rolls of film with unknown contents. The cost was about the same as a trip to the GLAM Wiki 2025 conference — for which I hadn’t been granted a scholarship.

Even before scanning, I thought how great it would be to find something in the archive that could be useful for uploading to Wikimedia Commons. At the same time, I knew well that the film had been stored chaotically, I had no one to ask about its contents, I wasn’t sure which of the people whose heir I became was the photographer, and I didn’t know how many frames they had devoted to, say, family gatherings, and how many to potentially useful material. Useful frames appeared on the very first day of going through the scans: it turned out that the photographs showed a variety of landmarks well enough, and it quickly became clear that the main author was my father (which meant there were no issues with exclusive copyright). Another possible “end point” for the archive project might have come if I had worked alone — despite the power of reverse image search, I couldn’t identify many locations, while members of my user group sometimes did so easily, sometimes with an engaged interest in the challenge. After ten days, the upload was complete, connections between some rolls became clear, and certain years of some shooting were identified. By that time, it was already obvious that the archive was comparable to the largest and most high-profile GLAM project in Russia — the collaboration with RIA Novosti, which over 11 months uploaded about 2,100 photographs; I had uploaded about 1,500 (which represents roughly one third of the photographs I had at my disposal; it’s hard, you know, to name the exact final number when photos of unfamiliar places are taken in countries without freedom of panorama — I can only expect that some of the images will be deleted).

Right at the start of working with the photo archive, we were able to find: elephants and fountains at the Leningrad Zoo (we at least knew the elephants had been there, but not the fountains), evidence of one of the churches on Kizhi Island being moved to the opposite end, photographs of previously unillustrated Berkuto­vo, Plotnichno, Karagol, and Aleksandrovka (now part of Rostov-on-Don), images of the Lake Station (since demolished and replaced by the River Station, which has also since been demolished), the Tombasov gun right after its unveiling and before being moved to a new site, the construction of the NIIPT test stand, photos of the Zenit–Bahia football match, an unknown pier in Petrokrepost (we still haven’t found where it was), and photographs of various landmarks in a slightly different state than today (without roofs, with different domes, squares before their expansion or historical restoration, notable buildings before they were sheltered, even a Lenin monument later replaced). There was also the first visit since 1914 of three Dutch ships to Leningrad in 1956… Most of these first discoveries related to Northwest Russia, the region we know and love best; but the archive also contains photographs from Ukraine, Estonia, along the Volga, and even Khabarovsk — so discoveries outside the region appeared quickly as well.

A few words about the photographers.

The main author was Yuri Polikarpovich Shakurin, who lived from 1938 to 2000. My grandfather, Polikarp Polikarpovich, during World War II was awarded two Orders of the Patriotic War, 2nd class, and the Order of the Red Star. After the capture of Berlin, he lived there with his family for several years (the family joined him from February 1946 to June 1949), then in Czechoslovakia (from January 1954 to March 1955). The photo archive begins in 1949 or 1955, after the family returned to the USSR, settling in Vyborg, where they lived in the Commandant’s House, and later, from 1956, in Pesochnoye. My father’s work during the archive period was connected with the river fleet, which is clearly reflected in the photographs.

The archive also includes several rolls shot by the Semyonov family, Leningrad workers also connected with shipbuilding since at least the 1940s.