Contemporary Photographic Art From Moscow

[This catalogue was published on the occasion of the Exhibition "Contemporary Photographic Art from Moscow" ; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 29. September bis 12. November 1995 ; Ifa-Galerie Friedrichstrasse, 29. September bis 5. November 1995 ; Akademie der Künste, 29. September bis 29. Oktober 1995 ; AES Group ...].

The history of Russian creative photography since the late 1950s, its artists and art works are the subjects of essays by the leading Russian curators and independent art historians.

Photography possesses a powerful ability to bear witness, aid remembrance, shape, and even alter recollection. In Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art, the general editor, Diane Neumaier, and twenty-three contributors offer a rigorous examination of the medium's role in late Soviet unofficial art. Focusing on the period between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, they explore artists' unusually inventive and resourceful uses of photography within a highly developed Soviet dissident culture. During this time, lack of high-quality photographic materials, complimented by tremendous creative impulses, prompted artists to explore experimental photo-processes such as camera and darkroom manipulations, photomontage, and hand-coloring. Photography also took on a provocative array of forms including photo installation, artist-made samizdat (self-published) books, photo-realist painting, and many other surprising applications of the flexible medium. Beyond Memory shows how innovative conceptual moves and approaches to form and content-echoes of Soviet society's coded communication and a Russian sense of absurdity-were common in the Soviet cultural underground. Collectively, the works in this anthology demonstrate how late-Soviet artists employed irony and invention to make positive use of difficult circumstances. In the process, the volume illuminates the multiple characters of photography itself and highlights the leading role that the medium has come to play in the international art world today. Beyond Memory stands on its own as a rigorous examination of photography's place in late Soviet unofficial art, while also serving as a supplement to the traveling exhibition of the same title.

FloodZone is Miami-based Russian photographer Samoylova's account of life on the knife-edge of the Southern U.S.: in Florida, where sea levels are rising and hurricanes threaten. These beautifully subtle and often unsettling images capture the mood of waiting, of knowing the climate is changing, and of living with it.

This text provides a source of citations to North American scholarships relating specifically to the area of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It indexes fields of scholarship such as the humanities, arts, technology and life sciences and all kinds of scholarship such as PhDs.

The fourth volume in a history of photography, this is a bibliography of books on the subject.

"The University of the Arts; Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia."