Critical Praise for “Politics & the Utopian Dream”

ArtCriticATL – Exhibition Review
Alluring and Illuminating “Photography as Propaganda” at Lumiere

October 11, 2011
By Robert Stalker

What countries could be more different than the Soviet Union and the United States during the first half of the 20th century? Yet, as suggested by Lumiere’s illuminating “Photography as Propaganda: Politics and the Utopian Dream,” many of their ideals and fantasies were actually alike, and so were the images that served their goals and cultural values.

Inspired in part by “Propaganda and Dreams,” the 1999 exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, the exhibit opens with pictures by American and Soviet photographers celebrating technology and the built environment. Margaret Bourke-White’s “George Washington Bridge” (1933) and Berenice Abbott’s “Night View, New York” (1932) sit alongside contemporary photographs of the Dneprostroy Dam and Kherson Shipbuilding Factory by Max Alpert and Simon Fridland, respectively.

The photos were produced in divergent contexts with quite different aims. Bourke-White worked for the capitalist Henry Luce’s Fortune as well as Look magazines, creating photos that seemed almost to advertise the romance of commerce and industry. Abbott worked independently in the 1930s on her “Changing New York” series, promoting a view of urban planning that she continued under the sponsorship of the Federal Art Project. Fridland and Alpert documented Soviet manufacturing and engineering for government news platforms such as ITAR-Tass, Izvestia and Pravda, constructing the not entirely accurate impression that the young, impoverished nation was heading full steam into the 20th century. Despite these differences, however, the photos share an almost palpable optimism about technological modernity and its culture of speed and mechanization…… ArtsCriticATL. Follow this link to read the entire review. (opens new browser window).