Authors

Jessica Werneke¹;  ¹ University of Iowa, United States

Discussion

After Stalin’s consolidation of the arts in the late 1930s, the manifold creative possibilities afforded to photographers in the preceding decades evaporated. Apart from criticism of the previous “formalist” styles of the avant-garde, debates about the purpose of photography in the Soviet context seemed to vanish from public debate. Yet, with the reestablishment of the journal Sovetskoe foto in 1956-7, muted conversations about the role of the modernism in shaping the aesthetics of Soviet photography quickly returned en force. This paper examines why the experimentation of the previous generation of art photographers was so instrumental to the revival of photographic culture in the USSR in the late 1950s and early 1960s.