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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Commissar Vanishes. The Falsification of Photographs and Art in the Soviet Uniondi David King
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Recently, I've seen a lot of people on social media whining about history being erased. They freak out when a statue or the Confederate flag is removed from a place of prominence. They're upset when teachers try to bring up the history of marginalized peoples that wasn't in the textbooks from which they learned history as a child, as if those books were engraved in stone or as sacred as the Bible. Sorry, but I don't see erasure. I see an engagement with history when a society grapples with what they value and how their story has been told. If social media snowflakes want to see what erasure really means, they need to leaf through this book and watch a dictator literally having his foes -- real and imagined -- removed from the historical record with black ink and airbrushes. They need to see people so scared of their government, they pull their own books off the shelves in their own homes and start scratching out, blotting out, and cutting out words and images that might cause them to get arrested and summarily shot. The book itself is fascinating in the best coffee table book manner, as you flip pages and watch a photograph of four men get cropped down to three men, then airbrushed to two men, and finally end up as a solitary portrait of Stalin. It's numbing to read again and again how the disappearing men were arrested and shot, arrested and shot, arrested and shot. So there is a lot of repetition and the dry text is cursory and assumes knowledge about the Russian Revolution and the reign of Stalin and his Great Purge of the 1930s. But the pictures pretty much tell the story. nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
"The Commissar Vanishes offers a chilling look at how one man - Joseph Stalin - manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. On Stalin's orders, purged rivals were airbrushed from group portraits, and crowd scenes were altered to depict even greater legions of the faithful. In one famous image, several Party members disappeared from an official photograph, to be replaced by a sylvan glade." "For the past three decades, author and photohistorian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of photographs, posters, and paintings from the Soviet era. His collection has grown to more than a quarter of a million images, the best of which have been selected for The Commissar Vanishes." "The efforts of the Kremlin airbrushers were often unintentionally hilarious. A 1919 photograph showing a large crowd of Bolsheviks clustered around Lenin, for example, became, with the aid of the retoucher, an intimate portrait of Lenin and Stalin sitting alone, and then, in a later version, of Stalin by himself." "The Commissar Vanishes is nothing less than the history of the Soviet Union, as retold through falsified images, many of them published here for the first time outside Russia. In each case, the juxtaposition of the original and the doctored images yields a terrifying - and often tragically funny - insight into one of the darkest chapters of modern history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)303.376Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Social Processes Coordination and control ; Power Social norms CensorshipClassificazione LCVotoMedia:
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Stalin, wishing to take on the mantle (and halo) of his predecessor, Lenin, mounted a two-pronged media campaign: he had photographs and paintings doctored to make it look as though he was closer to Lenin than he actually was (Lenin grew increasingly worried about Stalin's aggressive power grabs, but was felled by a stroke before he could do more than urge his colleagues to reign Stalin in); and he decreed it a crime against the State to possess any images of people -- officials and otherwise -- who had been "eliminated." Hence we see curious posed photographs, from author David King's extensive personal collection, published years or even months apart, heavily doctored to eliminate one or many subjects. Chillingly, as time progresses, these photos become less populated -- as though the subjects never existed.
One by one, the commissars...vanish. ( )