Snap Judgements: Turning Photography into Art in the Late Soviet Union

Abstract The history of photography and photography theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is often preoccupied with “Western” criticism and arguments regarding the photograph as art, document, or technology. Yet, this criticism has ignored the development of photographic theory in the Soviet Union, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, where prominent critical theorists devised their own interpretations of the social purpose of photography in the Soviet Union. These elucidations were based on a number of factors that were Soviet specific: the legacy of Stalinism, photographers’ lack of access to prestigious art unions, and explaining photography within the context of Socialist Realism, the officially mandated artistic style of the Soviet Union. An investigation of how these theoreticians conceived of photography within the ideological and aesthetic boundaries set by cultural authorities is warranted, not least because they addressed theoretical problems that were absent from and irrelevant to discourses about photography in the Capitalist West. During the 1950s and 1960s, rather than questioning the documentary authenticity of photographs, critics in the Soviet Union tended to rely on the camera’s perceived inability to lie, despite evidence of photographic manipulation in previous decades. The resulting stylistic and analytic discussions about photography led to the development of a distinctive type of Socialist Realist photography, or “artistic photojournalism,” the theoretical scope of which has been largely ignored and imitated the divide between East and West in terms of scholarship about photography.