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Title: Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US by Leah Bendavid-Val, Philip Brookman ISBN: 3908161800 Publisher: Edition Stemmle Pub. Date: May, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $55.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5

Rating: 5
Summary: Thirties brainwashing
Comment: A fascinating photo study of how two nations used photography to push their own political agenda. Author Bendavid-Val sums it up as...'The moral Russian individual was called upon to yeild unselfishly to his people. Americans on the other hand believed that the individual had a basic right to act aggressively on his own behalf, to make his own future...'.

The book starts with a super twenty-four pages of photos, each spread has a Soviet photo facing an American one, both dealing with the same subject, children, street scenes, farm workers, power stations, in a bar, shop windows etc. They do look very similar, least at first glance!

The essence of the book are two portfolios of black and white photos, first the Soviets with seventy-seven then the Americans with seventy-four, they are mostly one to a page and beautifully printed.

The author explains in an illustrated essay the thinking behind taking pictures for propaganda, this could turn out to be a bit of a hazard in the old Soviet Union where creative folk could become non-people as happened to photo-editor Lazar Mezhericher, declared a saboteur in 1937 and photographer Yakov Khalip who had the misfortune to take portraits of NKVD boss Nikolai Yezhov who vanished one fine day, also in 1937. Khalip's work was suddenly tainted!
Incidentally 'The Commissar Vanishes' by David King is an interesting book about the falsification of photos in Stalin's Russia

What the author does not cover is why the American photos are technically so much better than the Soviet ones. I assume this has to do with Roy Stryker's very tight shooting scripts that he made his photographers follow. Also the output of the FSA had to compete with commercial images from ad agencies and the like. The Soviet photographers would hardly have had to worry about such competition and so their photos were much more subjective and creative. Strangely a lot of the American photos were taken in the early forties, despite the book title refering to photography in the 1930s.

Unfortunately there is no index or bibliography, which I would have expected. In the 'Listomania' section of my...'see more about me' page I have made a Top-Ten list of books about about FSA photographs.

Leah Bendavid-Val is to be congratulated on producing an excellent book about documentary photogrphy during the 1930s. These photographs are some of the greatest ever taken.