![]() ![]() Performance cookies:These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use the website. Click on “Accept all” to accept all cookies or “Decline all” to Reject all Cookies. Whether you are a seasoned space historian, a space buff, or a casual reader, familiar space images will never look the same to you after you read this book.We use cookies to improve your experience on this website. Whether flipping through glossy pages of popular magazines or thumbing through dusty old photos in archives, Kohonen brings to life the immediate visuality of Soviet space experience and slices off layer after layer of meanings. Gagarin, the most recognizable icon of the time, did not see himself as an icon. This photographer told me in an interview that Gagarin wanted to give his mother precisely that old photo, where he was not famous yet, a photo that was not endlessly reprinted in the media, a photo that had captured his humanity before he was turned into a visual symbol of the Space Age. Instead he found the photographer who had taken a casual picture of him before the historic flight, when Gagarin was still a young, unknown pilot. When Gagarin’s mother asked him for a photo, he did not give her any of his iconic images, instantly recognizable around the world. While the government decreed that a bust of each flown cosmonaut should be erected in his or her home town, Alexei Leonov, the first “spacewalker,” objected to the installation of his monument, which thus had to remain in the sculptor’s studio for 28 years. My interviews with Soviet space program veterans and the study of personal diaries and archival materials suggest that cosmonauts did not easily identify with their own visual iconography. They encapsulate the contradictory essence of Soviet space mythology – an attempt to build a propaganda campaign around a highly secretive program, to prove the superiority of socialism while stressing the peaceful and international character of the space enterprise, and to mobilize mass enthusiasm for space exploration while reaffirming domestic family values. The ambivalence of cosmonaut roles – as heroes or ordinary people, as models of masculinity or family men, as emotional humans or extensions of technology – shines through many images in the book. A slow study of visual images, like slow reading, uncovers what a fast glance often misses – the expressions on the faces of villagers watching a just-landed cosmonaut, or the ordinary details of cosmonauts’ daily lives that undermine conventional stereotypes of masculinity. This book shows that neither documentary photos nor artwork can ever be reduced to a single meaning. Representations of humans and machines are blurred in utopian technological visions. Typical imagery of Soviet space heroes in public and in private evokes a fairytale script. Shades of color and grayness in space paintings display a range of conflicting emotions, from awe to escapism. Photos of heavenly bodies and depictions of space technology convey the message of conquest. In this book, each space picture is truly worth a thousand words – Kohonen’s analysis reveals not only the explicit intentions of the media, but also the underlying assumptions of the Soviet visual discourse. She studies the photographic record of the Soviet space program not for the sake of finding vanished cosmonauts, but to detect the embedded ideological messages – in other words, to compile the grammar of Soviet visual propaganda. Kohonen’s approach is different: she looks at smaller details and bigger context. Such studies addressed the questions of secrecy or immediate political expediency. Previous studies of the visual record of the Soviet space program focused on more obvious issues, such as the retouching of cosmonauts’ group photos to erase perished or expelled candidates, or the elimination of cosmonauts’ photos with Khrushchev after the embattled Soviet leader was ousted in 1964. In her talk, Iina Kohonen used this picture – one of the most ridiculous and at the same time symbolic images of the Space Age – to make a point about a touch of humanity in the idealized representations of cosmonauts by the Soviet propaganda machine. the 2009, Soviet I The saw at leader a offending a huge, conference Nikita blow-up shoelace Khrushchev on photo Soviet belonged of “space an upon untied to Yuri enthusiasm” a triumphal shoelace Gagarin, projected return in walking Basel, to Moscow after his pioneering space flight. ![]() In Switzerland, on to January meet the screen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |