Since World War 2, photography has been one of the most important tools in the media to record and document history as it happens throughout the World War, Korean Conflict, Vietnam and two Gulf Wars and “Police Actions” in between. But with it there has always been great debate of conflict of opinion to how honest it has been as Documentary Photography and Photojournalism and where it borders on Propaganda.
The Propaganda of the former Soviet Union is well known, especially the photomontage graphical posters of the 1930s through to the 1960s inspired by Rodchenko. This has gone on to inspire a medium within eastern art of the Nonconformist photographic image. A style of work that while has evolved is still popular within the gallery space worldwide.
This is a study of this Soviet and Russian made photography, and its relationship through subject matter, composition and suggested messages to western work produced from the same period of time until the current day. Key examples within the work are Robert Capa both his famous photographs of D-Day, & that produced four years later with John Steinbeck in “A Russian Journal”. 2 of Bruce Davidson’s most famous bodies of work: “A Time of Change”, a study of the events surrounding the African-American community and their fight for equal voting rights in the 1960s, and his earlier work of the Street Gangs of Brooklyn. Yevgeni Khaldei’s staged photograph of the Star and Sickle flying over a burning Berlin after it fell to Russian forces in May 1945, and the American equivalent taken only weeks earlier by Joe Rosenthal on the Pacific Island of Iwo Jima. It also considers references of more recent photographers and their photographic studies. A key example of this is Simon Roberts first book “Motherland”, a contemporary photo documentary by a Human Geographer rather then a Photographer, where he set out to try and show what it is to be Russian in a new millennium and the true meaning of “Rodina” to the Russian community.