“Boring Photography”: American New Topographics, Socialist Boredom, and Post-Soviet Deadpan Photography

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 lo...

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Chi tiết về thư mục
Xuất bản năm:URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ejas,
Tác giả chính: Musvik, Victoria
Định dạng: Article ou chapitre numérique
Ngôn ngữ:Anglais
Được phát hành: European journal of American studies 2023
Những chủ đề:
Truy cập trực tuyến:Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM
Miêu tả
Tóm tắt: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.