Propaganda & Dreams

ne of a community enjoying the bountiful rewards of labour. However, as the book does not tell you, but is surely of considerable significance to the way we might wish to view the photo, the years 1932-33 saw the height of the devastating famine in the Ukraine, in which about 5 million died.

So the authors of the book are asking us to believe that the situation of the US and Soviet photographers are largely equivalent, because both were using their photos in the interests of an agenda. In the one case it was to publicise the lot of the migrant workers in the South of the US, in the other it was to present an entirely false and benign image of a devastatingly brutal regime. They might as well have argued that they were equivalent because both used cameras. It typifies for me how a certain type of well-intentioned academic mind-set can completely miss the wood for the trees.

The afterword to the book entirely lives down to the general tone of academic writing about photography, which consistently and ponderously lectures us poor stupid readers, as though it was an entirely fresh insight, on the fact that photographs do not necessarily reflect reality.

The combination of documentary pictures with fabricated ideals represents the equivocal notion of truth in a variety of ways. Photographs may be staged or set up or they may be exact representations of historical events. They may use archives, texts, or props to build alternative views of history that question the relationship between truth and fiction. Scanning the archives of Soviet and American photography in the 1930s, we now rediscover a language that both preserves and alters our view of history because both memory and history strongly depend on such ambiguous representations. These images construct both propaganda and dreams for photographs, like memories, represent an illusion of the real world rather than the world itself.

In the middle of all that portentous verbiage, the deaths of millions somehow gets lost, pushed aside by the tedious mantra that “photographs, like memories, represent an illusion of the real world rather than the world itself”.