The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia
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.
Title | : | The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia |
Edition Language | : | English |
ISBN | : | 0805052941 |
Format Type | : | Hardcover |
Number of Pages | : | 192 pages |
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