Item type | Current library | Home library | Shelving location | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Books | American University in Dubai | American University in Dubai | Main Collection | TR 85 .K55 1997 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 43228 |
No cover image available | ||||||||
TR 23.5 .P37 2007 America, 2006 / | TR 28 .B834 2011 Timeless Mexico : the photographs of Hugo Brehme / | TR 73 .D48 1997 German photography 1870-1970 : power of a medium / | TR 85 .K55 1997 The commissar vanishes : the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia / | TR 85 .T87 1996 The Soviet photograph, 1924-1937 / | TR 95 .F5 K64 2003 Light in the wilderness / | TR 101 .H64 2009 The living theatre/ |
Includes bibliographical references (p. 190) and index
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.
There are no comments on this title.