Asserting Photography’s Social Function: Exhibitions of Soviet Photography in Interwar Czechoslovakia

Abstract

Several large-scale photographic exhibitions featuring substantial participation from the USSR were organised in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Despite the number of local and foreign actors they involved, and the critical response they triggered, they have raised limited scholarly interest so far. To shed light on the conditions under which these events were planned and realised, it is necessary to turn to exhibition catalogues, archives of the organisers and press reviews. Based on this data set, this article questions the part these displays played in propagating Soviet photographic discourses and aesthetic models in Czechoslovakia. New evidence from the archives of the Soviet All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (Vsesojuznoe obščestvo kul’turnoj svjazi s zagraničej [VOKS]) suggests that the Marxist critic Lubomír Linhart was the most committed mediator of Soviet photography and promoter of its documentary and utilitarian approach. By orchestrating the Soviet participation in the two exhibitions of social photography in 1933 and 1934, the International Exhibition of Photography in 1936 and in several unrealised projects, Linhart and other supporters of the USSR had succeeded, by the late 1930s, in asserting the photographer’s social function in Czechoslovakia, in close relation to the Soviet discourse on functional and politically committed photography.