The Sun without a Muzzle

Abstract

During the 1920s the collective efforts of leftist Soviet critics and photographers (connected to the New Lef magazine or the October Association) helped mass-oriented production of images assume the protagonist's position. However, it would be wrong to suppose that the throne of easel painting was usurped by photography. By the mid-1930s this seat of power had been abandoned owing to the “Jacobin terror” of postrevolutionary photography, whose functions included, inter alia, guarding the “empty center” from the restoration of artistic absolutism. Nature, however, abhors a vacuum and the role of legislator of artistic fashion was annexed by the art of power and control, which prevailed over the voluntarism and orderlessness of the authorial “I.” In the process, many paradigms of authorship—except those attributed to authoritarian power—became increasingly nominal. The media (including photojournalism and documentary film) was transmogrified from factographic into mythographic and joined in the task of “st...