Russian Self-Portraits by American photographer David Attie was made in 1976 in Kiev, Ukraine (then the USSR) during the USIA cultural exchange exhibition "Photography USA," inviting ordinary Soviet citizens to make their own studio portraits.
Rooted in Cold War cultural diplomacy, the project uses portraiture as a site of contact rather than surveillance, asking what can be learned when people who are typically pictured by outsiders become the makers of their own images. Attie’s decision to relinquish the "decisive moment" repositions authorship and complicates documentary claims to truth: the camera becomes a tool for self-description, and the resulting pictures register individual negotiation with public identity, self-awareness, and the pressure—real or imagined—of being seen. In this sense, the work also sits within a broader late-1960s/1970s turn toward participatory practices that treated image-making as a social exchange.
Visually, the series presents monochrome, largely full-length portraits made in a controlled studio environment. A full-length mirror shapes the subjects’ stance and gaze, producing a direct relationship between body, reflection, and camera. The long cable release—often visible—functions as both prop and evidence of agency, signaling that the sitter is also the operator. Across the series, sitters shift between formality and play, using small gestures, changes in stance, and quick expressions as they test how a photograph can map the distance between private feeling and public appearance. The lighting is even and deliberate, isolating figures against a neutral setting while still allowing fleeting, self-timed expressions to surface.
The method depended on a carefully staged process: the studio was briefly darkened, the shutter opened, and the subject triggered strobe lights via the cable release to complete the exposure. Attie used Polaroid materials to make the encounter immediate—participants could leave with an instant positive print—while he retained the negative that later supported gelatin silver prints for publication and display.
On release, the project was discussed as a challenge to conventional portrait power dynamics, and it has been revisited as an early model for later self-representation initiatives. Derek Bishton, Brian Homer, and John Reardon credited it as a blueprint for Handsworth Self Portrait (1979) in Birmingham, which used similar procedures to challenge reductive media narratives and externally imposed identities. Subsequent exhibitions, including the 1979 "Russians and Americans Photographing Themselves" at Midtown Y Photography Gallery in New York, and later revivals, have framed the work as a sustained inquiry into how photography can mediate identity across political and social divides.
