Boring Photography

American New Topographics, Socialist Boredom, and Post-Soviet Deadpan Photography

Bibliographic Data

ID6187909
AuthorsVictoria Musvik (European Humanities University, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume17
Issue4
Publication date2022-12-30
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEuropean Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336
PublisherOpenEdition (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4000/ejas.19138
OpenAlexW4315781882
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited37

This article looks at the exhibition New Landscape (2018), which was the first full-scale attempt to reflect on the popularity of “deadpan” photography in Russia in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The show was partly modeled on the American exhibition New Topographics (1975). I look at the reasons why the American model was adopted and the earlier late Soviet and Russian photographic projects that dealt with boredom, including the most non-conformist ones, were avoided. I conclude that the reasons for this should be analyzed in the complex postcolonial context, which includes the acting out of collective trauma. In my analysis, I focus on the link between trauma and repressed aggression, violence, and resentment. I also show how Russian deadpan photography has opposed Putin’s regime and developed a pioneer methodology for reflecting on the post-Soviet condition. The American model was used to bring together a diversity of viewpoints, which reveals more complex and integrated ways of dealing with collective affect

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Boredom · Context (archaeology · Exhibition · Frontier · Photography · Political science · Popularity · Resentment · Sociology · Viewpoints · Visual arts · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Photography and Visual Culture · Psychology · Social Psychology · Visual Culture and Art Theory

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