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Пробы постсоветского позирования (часть 2)
This article is about how bodies, camera and newspaper make the post-Soviet state
and social changes of the 90s visible. It tells a history of the awkwardness revealed in the act of
photographing. The author works with the letters and photographs that the readers of Komsomolskaya
Pravda sent to the hybrid beauty contest Miss KP announced by the newspaper between 1996 and 2000.
Awkwardness or incompleteness, ineptitude, inaccuracy of embodiment is found in the discursive figures
of the letters, in the incoherent juxtaposition of texts and photographs, and in the techniques of the
photographic posing. In the varieties of awkwardness, the author discovers the effects of the post-Soviet
experimentation with revealing the self through the embodiment and corporal tactics of mastering the
new in a situation where body patterns of dignity, success, beauty, attractiveness, actualized in posing
in front of the camera, change.