International Scholarly Conference "Art versus Document: Photography in Modern Russian History"

In the late 1920s, avant-garde photographers such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Eleazar Langman, Gustav Klucis, Boris Ignatovich, and El Lissitzky began to develop a genre of photographic documentation. Together with theorists, including Sergei Tret’iakov and Osip Brik, photographers worked to create a style of representation that would reveal the details of the new everyday Soviet life. Along with these theorists, who sought to develop a proletarian “literature of fact [literatura fakta],” photographer’s images would give the viewer a sense of the industrial technologies, which, in their view, formed the basis of the new proletarian collective. These ideas provoked many questions within the sphere of early Soviet visual culture about the differences between photography and visual art, between artistic illustrations for a “literature of fact” and photojournalism.

Our aim, at this conference, is to examine the legacies of these debates about photography and socialism as they developed from the late 1920s through to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We are particularly interested in regional and/or post-war interpretations of these debates. 

The working languages of the conference will be Russian and English.

Conference program

All inquiries should be sent via email to: worldwar2@hse.ru

Organization:

Angelina Lucento - Research Fellow, International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, National Research University - Higher School of Economics, alucento@hse.ru
Jessica Werneke - Research Fellow, International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences, National Research University - Higher School of Economics, dverneke@hse.ru