Album e foto di famiglia dell’Est Europa

The first part of the paper shows, through an anthropological visual documentation directly provided by the researcher, how in Russia, family pictures have been triggering the interest of many scholars for several decades now. In this respect, some contemporary researchers consider those pictures as an effective means of knowledge and a key of interpretation of Soviet times. The second section of the paper revolves around the investigation of family albums recovered in Gorodok, a small village in the Western Ukraine. All the selected pictures clearly highlight the change as well as the persistence of those mixed cultural patterns characterising the Western Ukraine families before, during and after communism.