Camera Obscura

Socialist Realism in the Shadow of Photography

Bibliographic Data

ID4299926
AuthorsLeah Dickerman (corresponding author)
Year2000
Volume93
Pages138
Publication date2000-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueOctober (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0162-2870 • E-ISSN: 1536-013X
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/779160
OpenAlexW2316417105
LanguageEN
Citations received19

its conflictlessness, referring to the harmonious relationships between worker and means of production, between masses and leader that appear within its images. Without doubt, pictures of social concordance comprise a major thematic impulse in Soviet visual practice. Ironically, despite its seamless harmonies, the official aesthetics of the Soviet Union in its founding decades betray a tremendous sense of conflictedness: one born of the fragile relationship between revolution, history, and technology. Clement Greenberg famously excluded socialist realism from the canon of Western modernism for inhabiting the realm of mass culture or kitsch.1 Yet, in at least one significant way socialist realism approaches Greenberg's modernism: it expresses a profound skepticism about the cultural effects of photomechanical reproduction. This essay explores the extent to which-despite its anachronistic look-socialist realism in the visual arts must be understood as a

Art · Art history · Photography · Psychoanalysis · Realism · Shadow (psychology · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Photography and Visual Culture · Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub