Indexical Realism during Socialism: Documenting and Remembering the ‘Everyday Realities’ of Late Socialist Romania through Photographs

Abstract

This paper focuses on photography of everyday life in late socialist Romania, analyzing the photographic production of artists and vernacular photographs from private scrapbooks and collections. On a theoretical level, it disentangles questions concerning the production of ideological images; the political dimension of the act of photographing/documenting everyday life; the relationship between photography and cultural memory; the question of the forbidden gaze and the ‘reality’ of the visual document. The argument is that realism can be seen as a proclivity of certain kinds of photographs rather than inextricably associated with the medium of photography as such (the so-called ‘indexical realism’). Supported by an in-depth analysis of visual sources and semi-structured interviews with visual artists active during those years, this paper highlights the relationship between photography and cultural hegemony and zooms in on the photograph’s mnemonic abilities.