Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US. - Review - book review

LEAH BENDAVID-VAL Propaganda and Dreams:

Zurich: Edition Stemmle 1999 224 pp; 250 b/wills. $55

Exhibition schedule: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC July 3 to October 3 1999; International Center of Photography, of recent origin York, October 20, 1999-February 13 2000; Regional Fine Arts Museum, Samara, May 25-June 18 2000; State Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, Moscow June 26-August 6 2000; State Russian Museum, St Petersburg September 15-November 1 2000

Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930 in the USSR and US, an exhibition organized by dint of Leah Bendavid-Val for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC which traveled to the International Center of Photography in fresh York City, takes on sum of two units of the most significant state-supported photo initiatives: work produc by dint of American photographers for the Farm Security Agency during the Depression, and by means of Soviet photojournalists employed by state publishing agencies. Bendavid-Val, a senior editor at National Geographic works selected approximately 115 American images, primarily from the FSA Archives in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congres and another 115 Soviet photographs gathered largely from the collections of the pair Russian news agencies and from those of the photojournalists and their families themselves.

The pairing is a compelling individual Both the American and Soviet images stand as planed efforts at political persuasion: to encourage support for of recent origin Deal policies in the United States, and participation in building the socialist state in the Soviet Union. And the one and the other function as particularly modern forms of visual propaganda, a symptom of the starting insight, catalyzed by means of the development of new information technologies and the uttermosts of post-World War I politics, that mass politics requires mass communication.

Propaganda and Dreams reminds us in what manner unusual it is for an exhibition to have a in truth comparative framework. Several multilocale exhibitions of that kind as Berlin-Moskau and Paris-Moscou have investigated the creative exchange and influence between artists working in those respective places, [1] on the other hand I am hard pressed to think of an exhibition that asks us to compare simultaneous and relatively isolated practices. The specific pairing of photographic work from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's America and Stalin's Russia shown here is actual much a post--Cold War crops The diminished threat of the evil empire appear to bes to have allowed us to abandon a myth of polar difference in order to ask if we might not be abundant like them. Taking Socialist Realist work seriously as a mark of artistic practice is likewise a relatively of recent origin thing. Propaganda and Dreams joins a handful of novel exhibitions (the Hayward Gallery's Art and Power, P 1's Aesthetic Arsenal, and the Museum Folkwang Essen's Glaube, Hoffnung Anpassung) in interroga ting Socialist Realism as a moot point of visual representation. [2] Propaganda and Dreams distinguishes itself from these exhibitions [i]or[/i] part of to the other both its focus on the camera image and its change between First World and next to the first World political spheres, and thus proffers an important analytic framework for considering issues of photography as social document in the pair historical and national perspective.

Propaganda and Dreams's novel comparative aim is insistently asserted in the constitution of the exhibition itself. Side-by-side pairings of Soviet and American images fill the first gallery; work from the sum of two units countries is separated in the nearest galleries; and then a small, final gallery brings them together again facing each other across the compass The catalogue offers a similar structure: a collection of paired images called "A Comparative Portfolio," followed by means of separate Soviet and American sections.

The exhibition lay opens with teamed images by Soviet Arkady Sbaikhet and sometime-FSA photographer Dorothea Lange, each showing a mother nursing her child out-of-doors, and not far from the site of labor.[3] (Lange's photograph is single from her famous Migrant Mother series.) The faculty of perception of eerie deja vu Bendavid-Val felt upon seeing the Soviet image for the first time, she take an account ofs us in the preface to her catalogue, provided the impetus for the throw as a whole:

In the Spring of 1989 while waiting for an appointment at Moscow's Novosti Pres Agency, I flipped end an old anthology of Soviet photographs, and came on some compelling pictures of a farm woman working in a field. entirely engaged in her sweating piece of work of planting, at the same time caring for her infant, she still managed to appear confident and purposeful in some way enlarged by her gritty work. This was quintessential Socialist Realism, still I was oddly struck by means of the similarities of this and other Soviet pictures to American photographs of the same period; in the pair countries the subjects were tribe with tough lives we could care about, and the photography mingled realism with romance, albeit in varying ways. (p7)

Other pairs within the opening section establish a harmonious flow of homologies (two boys here, sum of two units boys there, then a duo of close-up of stern-jawed men with machine tools), while true copy reinforces this sense of strange identity across political difference. The pamphlet asserts: "Even experts cannot number many of these photographs apart." The catalogue essay itself begins with an repercussion of sound of the universal humanism of Edward Steichen's famous 1955 Family of Man exhibition at The Museum of recent Art in New York: "They danced and we danced. They built dams and carbonized iron mills, planted and harvested, went in want of food nursed their children, and with equal reason did we. And in one as well as the other Russia and the United States we photographed all of that." on the other hand while Steichen's show presented contemporary images from across the globe, Propaganda and Dreams limits the time frame and geographic object in a tango for sum of two units set somewhere back in the past, the partners at one time enemies and lovers. In doing for a like reason it at least aims at historicity.