Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US [Hardcover]

Leah Bendavid-Val (Editor), James H. Billington (Foreword), Philip Brookman (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Bendavid-Val, a senior editor at National Geographic who curated this traveling exhibit with the support of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Russian Ministry of Culture, and the Library of Congress, has assembled a memorable collection of images: proud young women marching in a Moscow sports parade, a rifle pointing out from between Byzantine icons, a mantle clock serving as the most ornate headstone in a South Carolina graveyard, and uniformed children in gas masks. Among the 250 black-and-white photographs collected here, most come from the wonderful lenses of Americans Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee and Ukranian Boris Ignatovich. Accompanying this large-format social commentary is a thought-provoking text, written for the exhibit. The lack of an index, however, makes it difficult to track works by the 33 Soviet and 19 American photographers, and only 40 of the contributing photographers are included in a selected biographies section. It's also disconcerting that, although the book supposedly focuses on the 1930s, one-third of the Americans' photographs actually date from the early 1940s. Still, this is recommended for all public libraries and for academic libraries with large photography collections.AAnne Marie Lane, American Heritage Ctr., Laramie, WY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Edition Stemmle; 1St Edition edition (May 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3908161800
• ISBN-13: 978-3908161806
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 10 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,602,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Brookman is Chief Curator and Head of Research at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. He is currently working on a retrospective exhibition and book about British/American photographer Eadweard Muybridge for the Corcoran. He has organized and collaborated on major exhibitions for other museums including the Tate Modern, London, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was previously Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts at the Corcoran, and has held curatorial positions at Washington Project for the Arts, El Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is also a photographer, filmmaker, writer, and editor. He graduated with degrees 20th Century Art History and Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Brookman recently completed work on several exhibitions and books, including Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change, Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes, Leo Rubinfien: Wounded Cities, Modernism: Designing a New World, Sally Mann: What Remains, Common Ground: Discovering Community in 150 Years of Art, and Robert Frank: London/Wales for the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Robert Frank: Storylines for the Tate Modern and Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona. He was also co-curator of the exhibitions and co-editor of the books Robert Frank: Moving Out for the National Gallery of Art, Washington and Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Some of Brookman's other recent projects for the Corcoran include the exhibitions, books, and web sites Emmet Gowin: Changing the Earth, Media/Metaphor: The 46th Biennial Exhibition, and Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks. Brookman has since 1994 produced a number of other traveling exhibitions and books for the Corcoran, including Raised by Wolves: Photographs and Documents by Jim Goldberg, Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry, The Way Home: Ending Homelessness in America, and Arnold Newman: Breaking Ground

Customer Reviews

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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thirties brainwashing, April 14, 2002

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US (Hardcover)

A fascinating photo study of how two nations used photography to push their own political agenda. Author Bendavid-Val sums it up as...'The moral Russian individual was called upon to yeild unselfishly to his people. Americans on the other hand believed that the individual had a basic right to act aggressively on his own behalf, to make his own future...'.

The book starts with a super twenty-four pages of photos, each spread has a Soviet photo facing an American one, both dealing with the same subject, children, street scenes, farm workers, power stations, in a bar, shop windows etc. They do look very similar, least at first glance!

The essence of the book are two portfolios of black and white photos, first the Soviets with seventy-seven then the Americans with seventy-four, they are mostly one to a page and beautifully printed.

The author explains in an illustrated essay the thinking behind taking pictures for propaganda, this could turn out to be a bit of a hazard in the old Soviet Union where creative folk could become non-people as happened to photo-editor Lazar Mezhericher, declared a saboteur in 1937 and photographer Yakov Khalip who had the misfortune to take portraits of NKVD boss Nikolai Yezhov who vanished one fine day, also in 1937. Khalip's work was suddenly tainted!
Incidentally 'The Commissar Vanishes' by David King is an interesting book about the falsification of photos in Stalin's Russia

What the author does not cover is why the American photos are technically so much better than the Soviet ones. I assume this has to do with Roy Stryker's very tight shooting scripts that he made his photographers follow. Also the output of the FSA had to compete with commercial images from ad agencies and the like. The Soviet photographers would hardly have had to worry about such competition and so their photos were much more subjective and creative. Strangely a lot of the American photos were taken in the early forties, despite the book title refering to photography in the 1930s.

Unfortunately there is no index or bibliography, which I would have expected.

Leah Bendavid-Val is to be congratulated on producing an excellent book about documentary photogrphy during the 1930s. These photographs are some of the greatest ever taken.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.