The Commissar Vanishes

This volume looks at how Joseph Stalin manipulated the science of photography to further his own political career and to erase the memory of his victims. Over the past 30 years, author and photo-historian David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored photographs from the Soviet era, the best of which have been selected for this book.

A New York Times Notable Book, 1997 The lavishly illustrated and often darkly hilarious retelling of Soviet history through the doctored photographs under Stalin. The Commissar Vanishes has been hailed as a brilliant, indispensable record of an era. The Commissar Vanishes offers a unique and chilling look at how one man--Joseph Stalin--manipulated the science of photography to advance his own political career and erase the memory of his victims. Over the past thirty years David King has assembled the world's largest archive of doctored Soviet photographs, the best of which appear here, in a book Tatyana Tolstaya, in The New York Review of Books, called "an extraordinary, incomparable volume."

Through an array of posters, photographs, paintings, magazines, book jackets, advertisements, pamphlets and other rare ephemera, this book tells the story of the Soviet Union, from the Russian Revolution to the death of Stalin.

Exploring an unjustly overlooked figure in 20th-century British visual culture This book offers a comprehensive overview to the work and legacy of David King (1943-2016), whose fascinating career bridged journalism, graphic design, photography, and collecting. King launched his career at Britain's Sunday Times Magazine in the 1960s, starting as a designer and later branching out into image-led journalism. He developed a particular interest in revolutionary Russia and began amassing a collection of graphic art and photographs--ultimately accumulating around 250,000 images that he shared with news outlets. Throughout his life, King blended political activism with his graphic design work, creating anti-Apartheid and anti-Nazi posters, covers for books on Communist history, album artwork for The Who and Jimi Hendrix, catalogues on Russian art and society for the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and typographic covers for the left-wing magazine City Limits. This well-researched and finely illustrated publication ties together King's accomplishments as a visual historian, artist, journalist, and activist.

In exploring the intersection of art, politics and society, few collections in the world can compare with the David King collection. David King (1943?2016) was not only a passionate collector, but also an artist, designer and historian. Over a lifetime he amassed one of the world?s largest collections of Soviet political art and photographs. Every step of the Soviet journey is documented in visual media, photomontage, photographs, paintings, handwritten notes, books (signed with annotations and marginalia), enclosures and ephemera. The collection is also unique in examples of image manipulation techniques, erasures and deletions, and in the survival, despite the purges, of extremely rare books and manuscripts by the early revolutionaries who died in the?Show Trials? of 1936?38.00Exhibition: Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom (08.11.2017 - 18.02.2018).

A Granta Best Young American Novelist 1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, where we meet a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director of a gulag and many others.

Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.

"It is a long-held truism that 'the camera does not lie'. Yet, as Mia Fineman argues in this illuminating volume, that statement contains its own share of untruth. While modern technological innovations, such as Adobe's Photoshop software, have accustomed viewers to more obvious levels of image manipulation, the practice of "doctoring" photographs has in fact existed since the medium was invented. In "Faking It", Fineman demonstrates that today's digitally manipulated images are part of a continuum that begins with the earliest years of photography, encompassing methods as diverse as overpainting, multiple exposure, negative retouching, combination printing, and photomontage. Among the book's revelations are previously unknown and never before published images that document the acts of manipulation behind two canonical works of modern photography: one blatantly fantastical (Yves Klein's "Leap into the Void" of 1960); the other a purportedly unadulterated record of a real place in time (Paul Strand's "City Hall Park" of 1915). Featuring 160 captivating pictures created between the 1840s and 1990s in the service of art, politics, news, entertainment, and commerce, "Faking It" provides an essential counterhistory of photography as an inspired blend of fabricated truths and artful falsehoods."--Publisher's website.