We are looking for a third presenter for a panel at the upcoming ASEEES dedicated to photography and socialism (see panel description below), working either on the visual culture of socialism or on the social history of photography in the Second World. The topics of the other two panelists are Soviet-era family photography, and the changing contents of the journal Fotografia v SSSR.

Please contact Oksana Sarkisova at sarkisovao@ceu.hu

Photography in the “Second World”

This panel aims to address the many points of connection between photography and socialist modernity. What can a study of photographic archives reveal about the aspirations and realities of socialism in the 20th century and conversely, what does the socialist period have to teach us about photography? What kinds of projects was socialist photography part of, and how did it shape and was shaped by the culture of vision in the former "Second World"? Is there something distinctive about photography in socialist modernity, and how is it entangled in this context with the issues of power, ideology and governmentality? The papers that comprise this panel will address different aspects of photographic practice, from amateur to press photography, and different historical moments of the 20th century, interrogating the varieties of socialist photographic cultures and the ways of seeing that they represented.