October 20, 1999 - February 13, 2000
Among the exhibition's surprises are the striking similarities of both style and content between FSA images meant to refocus the American dream and Soviet images intended to reflect utopian socialist ambitions.
Yet the exhibition also highlights their crucial differences, particularly in how they represent individuals and communities, their relationship to government and each other, and their relative importance to society.
A unique exploration of the era surrounding Roosevelt's New Deal and Stalin's Five-Year Plans, this groundbreaking exhibition compares for the first time government-sponsored Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography created in the US with Socialist Realist photographs produced in the USSR during the 1930s. Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US will be on view at the International Center of Photography, 1130 Fifth Avenue (at 94th Street) from October 20, 1999 through February 13, 2000. The exhibition explores the meaning, purpose, and public reception of these vast and historically important photographic projects. Presenting dozens of previously unpublished photographs and looking afresh at familiar ones, this unique exhibition includes the work of American photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn, and Soviet photographers, including Alexander Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich, Elizar Langman, and Arkady Shaikhet, among others. The Propaganda and Dreams exhibition and its accompanying catalogue have enjoyed wide critical acclaim and enthusiastic public attention since their premiere last summer at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Guest curator Leah Bendavid-Val, independent curator and Senior Editor for the Book Division of National Geographic, spent four years gathering information and photographs from a wide variety of sources throughout Russia, including state and city archives, museums, galleries, and the photographers and their families. Bendavid-Val's primary resource for the FSA images was the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC., which has housed the FSA archive since 1946. Propaganda and Dreams examines two exceptional and moving groups of photographs. One shows the many faces of the Depression in the US-rural poverty, unemployment, government relief programs, and westward migration. The other offers images of industrialization, collective farms, heroic workers, and monumental state projects in the Soviet Union. Both were used in the production of propaganda and publicity that was shaped and distributed by a network of publishers, policymakers, and the photographers themselves. But the photographs provide insight into the dreams and realities of the two very different nations. This exhibition offers audiences a rare opportunity to make side-by-side comparisons of these remarkable photographs, many of which have become icons of the period. It also features posters, magazine layouts, outtakes, and contextual materials that illustrate how American and Soviet photographers and their governments made and used photographic images. The mission of Socialist Realist photography during the 1930s was to show how life was improving under Josef Stalin's leadership and his program of Five-Year Plans (1928-1937). Using a variety of photographic styles-straightforward and seemingly factual to graphic and dynamic, employing extreme close-ups and unusual perspectives-Soviet photographers documented their countrymen at work building a new way of life, a Socialist future. Their images, of subjects ranging from everyday life and idealized workers to sports parades and massive building projects, were reproduced in government publications, used in posters and photomontage, displayed in exhibitions, and even placed in picture magazines circulated outside the USSR. To ensure that the images conveyed the desired political message, however, their production and dissemination was carefully directed by government bureaucrats. Nonetheless, they form a complex portrait of Soviet life, art, and politics that exceeds any unified image the government hoped to create. As Soviet photographers used photography to communicate state goals of collectivization and social progress, photographers in the US were employed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agencies to document and publicize government projects. The most prominent of these sponsors was the Farm Security Administration (FSA), established during the Depression to stabilize American agriculture. From 1935 to 1943, the FSA hired photographers to create accessible images that would inform the public about farming problems and encourage support of the agency's mission. Distributed in government publications, the national press, traveling exhibitions, and increasingly popular picture magazines, these photographs brought the desperate circumstances of America's destitute to national attention. Under the direction of Roy Stryker, over a quarter of a million negatives were created for the FSA, and while many record the hardships and enduring spirit of Americans, others are simple records of everything from signs and store windows to old buildings and townscapes. As Stryker hoped, these photographs comprise an extraordinary pictorial archive that documents rural and small-town American life in the 1930s. Propaganda and Dreams examines how images from each of these immense photographic projects were created and consumed, as well as how they communicate the ever-shifting points of view of their makers, users, and viewers. Among the exhibition's surprises are the striking similarities of both style and content between FSA images meant to refocus the American dream and Soviet images intended to reflect utopian socialist ambitions. Yet the exhibition also highlights their crucial differences, particularly in how they represent individuals and communities, their relationship to government and each other, and their relative importance to society.
Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US is made possible by a generous grant from Chemonics International Inc., with additional support from The Trust for Mutual Understanding. Chemonics has also supported the ICP presentation.