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A New York Times Notable Book, 1997 The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin. The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant, indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs, the best of which appear here, in a book Tatyana Tolstaya, in The New York Review of Books, called "an extraordinary, incomparable volume."
Through an array of posters, photographs, paintings, magazines, book jackets, advertisements, pamphlets and other rare ephemera, this book tells the story of the Soviet Union, from the Russian Revolution to the death of Stalin.
Exploring an unjustly overlooked figure in 20th-century British visual culture This book offers a comprehensive overview to the work and legacy of David King (1943-2016), whose fascinating career bridged journalism, graphic design, photography, and collecting. King launched his career at Britain's Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, starting as a designer and later branching out into image-led journalism. He developed a particular interest in revolutionary Russia and began amassing a collection of graphic art and photographs--ultimately accumulating around 250,000 images that he shared with news outlets. Throughout his life, King blended political activism with his graphic design work, creating anti-Apartheid and anti-Nazi posters, covers for books on Communist history, album artwork for The Who and Jimi Hendrix, catalogues on Russian art and society for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and typographic covers for the left-wing magazine City Limits. This well-researched and finely illustrated publication ties together King's accomplishments as a visual historian, artist, journalist, and activist.
Red Star Over Russia by Natalia Sidlina,Matthew Gale Pdf
In exploring the intersection of art, politics and society, few collections in the world can compare with the David King collection. David King (1943?2016) was not only a passionate collector, but also an artist, designer and historian. Over a lifetime he amassed one of the world?s largest collections of Soviet political art and photographs. Every step of the Soviet journey is documented in visual media, photomontage, photographs, paintings, handwritten notes, books (signed with annotations and marginalia), enclosures and ephemera. The collection is also unique in examples of image manipulation techniques, erasures and deletions, and in the survival, despite the purges, of extremely rare books and manuscripts by the early revolutionaries who died in the?Show Trials? of 1936?38.00Exhibition: Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (08.11.2017 - 18.02.2018).
A Granta Best Young American Novelist 1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, where we meet a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director of a gulag and many others.
Photography possesses a powerful ability to bear witness, aid remembrance, shape, and even alter recollection. In Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, the general editor, Diane Neumaier, and twenty-three contributors offer a rigorous examination of the medium's role in late Soviet unofficial art. Focusing on the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, they explore artists' unusually inventive and resourceful uses of photography within a highly developed Soviet dissident culture. During this time, lack of high-quality photographic materials, complimented by tremendous creative impulses, prompted artists to explore experimental photo-processes such as camera and darkroom manipulations, photomontage, and hand-coloring. Photography also took on a provocative array of forms including photo installation, artist-made samizdat (self-published) books, photo-realist painting, and many other surprising applications of the flexible medium. Beyond Memory shows how innovative conceptual moves and approaches to form and content-echoes of Soviet society's coded communication and a Russian sense of absurdity-were common in the Soviet cultural underground. Collectively, the works in this anthology demonstrate how late-Soviet artists employed irony and invention to make positive use of difficult circumstances. In the process, the volume illuminates the multiple characters of photography itself and highlights the leading role that the medium has come to play in the international art world today. Beyond Memory stands on its own as a rigorous examination of photography's place in late Soviet unofficial art, while also serving as a supplement to the traveling exhibition of the same title.
Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.
Mia Fineman,National Gallery of Art (U.S.),Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Author : Mia Fineman,National Gallery of Art (U.S.),Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Publisher : Metropolitan Museum of Art Page : 298 pages File Size : 50,6 Mb Release : 2012 Category : Exhibitions ISBN : 9781588394736
Faking it by Mia Fineman,National Gallery of Art (U.S.),Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Pdf
"It is a long-held truism that 'the camera does not lie'. Yet, as Mia Fineman argues in this illuminating volume, that statement contains its own share of untruth. While modern technological innovations, such as Adobe's Photoshop software, have accustomed viewers to more obvious levels of image manipulation, the practice of "doctoring" photographs has in fact existed since the medium was invented. In "Faking It", Fineman demonstrates that today's digitally manipulated images are part of a continuum that begins with the earliest years of photography, encompassing methods as diverse as overpainting, multiple exposure, negative retouching, combination printing, and photomontage. Among the book's revelations are previously unknown and never before published images that document the acts of manipulation behind two canonical works of modern photography: one blatantly fantastical (Yves Klein's "Leap into the Void" of 1960); the other a purportedly unadulterated record of a real place in time (Paul Strand's "City Hall Park" of 1915). Featuring 160 captivating pictures created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, "Faking It" provides an essential counterhistory of photography as an inspired blend of fabricated truths and artful falsehoods."--Publisher's website.
This brand new edition of David King’s lauded visual history is a unique and brilliant study into the doctoring and propogandising of Soviet photographs by Stalin’s regime. From the creator of the award-winning ‘Red Star Over Russia’ 'The Commissar Vanishes' offers a chilling look at how Joseph Stalin manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. On Stalin’s orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. For example, a 1919 photograph showing a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin, became, with the aid of the retoucher, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in a later version, of Stalin by himself. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored images yields a fascinating, terrifying and tragic insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history. -- Publisher's description
This book is a revealing portrait of two countries, embodying the fantasies, ideals, and grim realities of an era. But this book is also about today, about how we get information and arrive at opinions about our own times.
A Companion to the Russian Revolution by Daniel Orlovsky Pdf
A compendium of original essays and contemporary viewpoints on the 1917 Revolution The Russian revolution of 1917 reverberated throughout an empire that covered one-sixth of the world. It altered the geo-political landscape of not only Eurasia, but of the entire globe. The impact of this immense event is still felt in the present day. The historiography of the last two decades has challenged conceptions of the 1917 revolution as a monolithic entity— the causes and meanings of revolution are many, as is reflected in contemporary scholarship on the subject. A Companion to the Russian Revolution offers more than thirty original essays, written by a team of respected scholars and historians of 20th century Russian history. Presenting a wide range of contemporary perspectives, the Companion discusses topics including the dynamics of violence in war and revolution, Russian political parties, the transformation of the Orthodox church, Bolshevism, Liberalism, and more. Although primarily focused on 1917 itself, and the singular Revolutionary experience in that year, this book also explores time-periods such as the First Russian Revolution, early Soviet government, the Civil War period, and even into the 1920’s. Presents a wide range of original essays that discuss Brings together in-depth coverage of political history, party history, cultural history, and new social approaches Explores the long-range causes, influence on early Soviet culture, and global after-life of the Russian Revolution Offers broadly-conceived, contemporary views of the revolution largely based on the author’s original research Links Russian revolutions to Russian Civil Wars as concepts A Companion to the Russian Revolution is an important addition to modern scholarship on the subject, and a valuable resource for those interested in Russian, Late Imperial, or Soviet history as well as anyone interested in Revolution as a global phenomenon.
A Little Corner of Freedom by Douglas R. Weiner Pdf
While researching Russia's historical efforts to protect nature, Douglas Weiner unearthed unexpected findings: a trail of documents that raised fundamental questions about the Soviet political system. These surprising documents attested to the unlikely survival of a critical-minded, scientist-led movement through the Stalin years and beyond. It appeared that, within scientific societies, alternative visions of land use, resrouce exploitation, habitat protection, and development were sustained and even publicly advocated. In sharp contrast to known Soviet practices, these scientific societies prided themselves on their traditions of free elections, foreign contacts, and a pre-revolutionary heritage. Weiner portrays nature protection activists not as do-or-die resisters to the system, nor as inoffensive do-gooders. Rather, they took advantage of an unpoliced realm of speech and activity and of the patronage by middle-level Soviet officials to struggle for a softer path to development. In the process, they defended independent social and professional identities in the face of a system that sought to impose official models of behavior, ethics, and identity for all. Written in a lively style, this absorbing story tells for the first time how organized participation in nature protection provided an arena for affirming and perpetuating self-generated social identities in the USSR and preserving a counterculture whose legacy survives today.