- Title Information
- Title
- All Eyes on Russia: Margaret Bourke-White's Early Soviet Photographs
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Johnson, Josie Rose
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- creator
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Nickel, Douglas
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Advisor
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Shaffer, Holly
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Personal
- Name Part
- Sichel, Kim
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- Reader
- Name:
Corporate
- Name Part
- Brown University. Department of History of Art and Architecture
- Role
- Role Term:
Text
- sponsor
- Origin Information
- Copyright Date
- 2020
- Physical Description
- Extent
- xxiii, 570 p.
- digitalOrigin
- born digital
- Note:
thesis
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2020
- Genre (aat)
- theses
- Abstract
- In 1930, American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904–1971) traveled to the Soviet Union on her first trip abroad. Her auspicious visit occurred during a moment of improving Soviet-American relations and increased experimentation with photography as a mass medium. Despite her self-proclaimed ignorance of Soviet life, lands, and politics, Bourke-White capitalized on these favorable conditions and returned twice more in 1931 and 1932, creating a suite of images that would be published and exhibited extensively across the United States and around the world.
This dissertation examines the production and dissemination of Bourke-White’s Soviet photographs through various channels. Through close study of these photographic objects alongside rich archival records from Bourke-White and her broad circle of contacts, I situate these photographs between the American traditions of pictorialist photography and documentary photography, on the one hand, and their supposed political and stylistic opposites of the Russian Avant-Garde and Socialist Realism on the other. This survey reveals how Bourke-White’s striving for stylistic innovation and political neutrality left her photographs open to a wide variety of interpretations as they traversed disparate ideological and aesthetic contexts.
Organized chronologically, each chapter focuses on a different photographic medium from this body of work. Chapter One examines how American and Soviet magazines reframed Bourke-White’s Soviet photographs to serve different political readings. Chapter Two details the creation and reception of Bourke-White’s first book, Eyes on Russia (1931), explaining how she and her audiences primarily conceived of the book as artistic and apolitical. Chapter Three turns to newspapers, centering on Bourke-White’s six-part series on Soviet life in the New York Times (1932), to illustrate her increasing involvement in political activity. Chapter Four uncovers the troubled histories of Bourke-White’s final Soviet projects from this period, each released in 1934: a film, photomurals, and a deluxe print portfolio. Each of these three projects became mired in issues related to production costs, public accessibility, perceived political meanings, and minimal returns on investment. In the Conclusion, I consider the complex agency of both the photographs and the photographer in constructing and preserving history from the 1930s into the post-Soviet era.
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01411641")
- Topic
- Periodicals
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01204155")
- Topic
- United States
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01061714")
- Topic
- Photography
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01207312")
- Topic
- Russia
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01919950")
- Topic
- Photobooks
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01210281")
- Topic
- Soviet Union
- Subject
- Topic
- interwar
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01177159")
- Topic
- Women artists
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01062022")
- Topic
- Photojournalism
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01078957")
- Topic
- Propaganda
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01423814")
- Topic
- Newspapers
- Subject (fast)
(authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/01904263")
- Topic
- Photomurals
- Language
- Language Term (ISO639-2B)
- English
- Record Information
- Record Content Source (marcorg)
- RPB
- Record Creation Date
(encoding="iso8601")
- 20210607
- Type of Resource (primo)
- dissertations