Purely naturalistic photography is unusable for advertising

N. Tarabukin

     The moment fixed by photography can be identified as the historic time of the creation of the picture, but under specific circumstances it can also be eternal presence. The snapshot of the anonymous young man pushing an enormous stone during the construction of the first Yugoslav highway, taken in 1958, can, in that sense, be read in the framework of the myth of Prometheus, in a positive context, or of Sisyphus, in the negative one. The visual message of the work of art in the agitprop era is constructed, seemingly paradoxically, primarily in the symbolic and allegorical key. Its main task was not to inform accurately or represent the world “objectively”. Writing about photography, contemporaries claimed that it was not enough if it “showed chimneys and wheel– barrows”, it was necessary “to express the image of the new man, the builder of socialism, the image of a man creating great works in our country and elevating, bringing up and ennobling himself through the creation of such works”. 86 The principal features of the new man were outlined way back in the circles of avant–garde artistic groups, with him assuming, in the context of the totalitarian regimes preceding the Second World War, the features of a mythical hero capable of performing grandiose labors to the benefit of the entire social community. A thus changed image, i.e. narration on the new man founded on the mythical concept of a hero was adopted in the agitprop era together with other patterns of Stalinist art. The utopist projection of the new man, mythologized and translated into a hero concept, as the universal cultural cliché, is reproduced and moves from literature to sculpture, from theoretical texts to news reports, up to photography and money.

    What is believed to be the original photograph of Alija Sirotanović, taken by Nikola Bibić, a reporter of the Borba daily, is far better known as a technical reproduction on a banknote than a work of art. That photograph, i.e. its widely circulated copies, undoubtedly belong to the repertoire of mass performances in which the hero of the new Yugoslav community acquires concrete visual form. In the process of constructing the hero myth numerous facts, such as the precise identification of the hero, are transformed or are simply rejected as nonfunctional. The mass spectacle of the pictures of the new man who “creates great works” had to gain such popularity precisely on this example because it completely fulfilled the established scenario and typology of the hero in totalitarianism. It is, primarily, a young and strong miner. A lot has been said about youth and its symbolic and archetypal role in totalitarianism, but it is very important to know here that the mythical properties of the young hero are standardized as a norm in the aesthetic and political system of communism as this, above all, postulates the key ideal of the future.⁸⁷ The Party however, constructed the image of the hero of Yugoslav socialist construction after the model of the Soviet typology of the miner – shock worker Alexey Stakhanov, upon whom an entire movement bearing the same name was founded in 1935.⁸⁸ It is interesting to note that in the process of reproduction, the copy of the Soviet model–hero retained the same initials: A.S. = A.S. That could also be read as Alexey Stakhanov = Alija Sirotanović, and ultimately, the correct solution to the rebus would be USSR = Yugoslavia in the context of political rhetoric.

    In fact, according to the hierarchy proposed by Günther, on a scale of four basic types of hero in the art of socialist realism, first place goes to the hero of labor whose image is formed according to the classical myth of Prometheus.⁸⁹ The picture of the handsome smiling miner, Alija Sirotanović, taken from close–up, who, as written in the caption, broke all records in mining coal and whose only wish after he had performed that grandiose feat was to have just a bigger shovel for himself, became the trademark of the Yugoslav “economic miracle” and a popular icon from a banknote which was in use from 1955 to 1989.⁹⁰

    The impact of that picture, basically a photographic message, on the collective unconscious primarily relied on mechanisms of symbolization and allegorization which depersonalize the concrete person on the one hand, while construing a universally desirable model of behavior, on the other. The photograph of an anonymous shock worker, and there were many of them in the first decades of building socialism, precisely because it was mass–reproduced not only on bills of large but also of small denominations, unquestionably came into the hands of every last inhabitant of the new Yugoslavia born in socialism. The photograph, which was by technical reproduction means multiplied on an enormous scale and was no longer a direct naturalistic representation, was transformed into an advertising visual message – the image of the hero of labor imparts the ideology of communism. He is, additionally, instrumentalized so perfectly and subordinated to the ideal concept of the hero that, even during his lifetime, the photograph of Alija Sirotanović grew into a mythical representation. The picture of the young miner–shock worker survived the dictatorship of the proletariat in which even prominent leaders of the revolution fell from grace and vanished from the political scene, partly because of the fact that it was visual evidence of the basic utopist idea of the new man of communism. One can even say that the most popular Yugoslav mythical hero died at the moment when the collective concept of the new man vanished from the horizon – the banknote with the photograph of the miner was officially withdrawn from circulation on 31 December 1989 . The 1990's saw processes of the dramatic break–up of the socialist Yugoslavia , or “Tito's Yugoslavia ”, as many in the West called it, unfold on the political map of the world.

    It is justified to doubt the authenticity of the photograph of Alija Sirotanović,⁹¹ because according to the proposed hero typology in totalitarianism, he also has to be anonymous, his anonymity being the crucial line separating him from the other type of hero – the leader, who has to be known and precisely identified in all representations. If the opinions are true that the image of the new man of socialist realism was first conceived of in the medium of literature, then photography, as a mass medium of visual communication distributed his picture to every house, perhaps even into every pocket. The photograph of the hero of labor, the shock–worker miner, became the visual matrix and new icon of the mass communist culture, and, having been shaped upon a ready–made stereotype, it was readily reproducible and movable from medium to medium, not only from the photograph to the banknote, but also to sculpture and painting. The new man represented as a hero of labor is recognized as the dominant visual pattern and norm of representation in the map of geographically and culturally different communist countries.

    The defining of the typical representation in the art of socialist realism or the quest for the hero of the new age, evolved within the dichotomy “We” and “They”, the old and the new, the traditional and the avant–garde. In line with these main divisions in society, we can distinguish between “positive and negative 'typified' heroes. The term 'typified' is used because even real people, given as one or the other kind of role model, were portrayed as representatives of a given social group or phenomenon”.⁹² Naturally, the first and greatest “type”, i.e. the positive mythical hero and moral ideal of the entire Yugoslav community, was Josip Broz Tito, who was always and ever everyone's comrade. We cannot speak here about the personality cult, a very serious and extensive subject, but in connection with the visual configuration of the hero in communism, the opinion of a contemporary is apposite: “When a person in the history of a people coalesces to such an extent with its aspirations and pursuits, with the struggle for noble ideals, it becomes synonymous with it all, the symbol of the nation and country.” ⁹³. “The symbol of the nation and country” was visualized by a photograph in which Josip Broz Tito is shown in profile from a low angle, where his compact silhouette, given its coloration and minimal figuration, is more suggestive of a stone bust than a real flesh and blood body. If the narration on the personality cult in the 20 th century is fundamentally shaped by the mass media, although the role of photography has still not been sufficiently researched, some things, nevertheless, need to be said.

	Пионири, 1949. Pioneers, 1949

    All the inhabitants of Yugoslavia, from young people in “popular libraries and reading rooms” to pupils, workers and cooperative members, for years and decades, spent every moment of their working hours under the vigilant eye of comrade Tito. Large photographs of him were a must of every classroom, office, official premises and institution. These were photographic portraits designed according to the rules of traditional ruler iconography – most often in a marshal's uniform with insignia of political and military power. Although these photographs retained the standard of representative ruler portraits, they lacked the traditional aura of a work of art, because, as inexpensive pictures, they could be reproduced in infinite number. It is not all that easy to answer with a simple “yes” or “no” whether then, reciprocally, the ruler himself lost some of his charismatic aura. We can say that the photograph, from a quantitative standpoint, increases the charisma of the leader because his pictures make their way faster and more easily than sculptures into every public space: from tiny janitor's booths to congress halls. This greatly promotes the old rituals and tactics of spreading the cult of the “new Messiah”, but the privilege of a three–dimensional object, i.e. the suggestiveness of a monumental memorial is lost. But, again, the omnipresent photograph of the leader belongs to the same level of semeiologic interpretation as the official portraits or sculptures of rulers which traditionally marked institutions of power. Accordingly, we must bear in mind where photography also is concerned that the expression of genuine power is precisely that multiplication and dissemination of “the body–of–power”. Namely, “a ruler does not exist except in and through his pictures.” ⁹⁴

    A report on “labor victories” as well as a photograph of a smiling cooperative farmer or proletarian with face uplifted towards the sky can be interpreted as both “fact” and reality, fundamentally opposed to the formalistic or abstract representation of the “Other”, decadent and bourgeois art. Photographs of strong young workers and spry female athletes are coded representations of an idyllic, primarily moral order, adorning the classless society and the image of the new man. A critical look at photographs from the first decades of socialism shows that spontaneously “captured” motifs were never a direct manifestation of “life” but the product of manipulation and simulation of the mass media under the full control of the Party propaganda apparatus.⁹⁵ With the intention of systematically transforming the life of the collective and determining the class position of the individual, photography, like the other mass media, was mobilized and instrumentalized in the context of the grandiose utopist project of the new reading of history, i.e. of education and re– education.⁹⁶

	Тошо Дабац, Апостол Јован, Сопоћани, 1363. (1958) Tošo Dabac, The Apostle John, Sopoćani, 1363 (1958)

    Oto Bihalji Merin, Jara Ribnikar and other artists and theoreticians of Marxism gathered around the Jugoslavija magazine, constructed together, like real engineers, by picture and by word, a heroized image of man in communism. The limits of individual freedoms as well as the function of every individual in the new social community were defined through the image of the new man. This magazine is an inter– textual collective masterpiece of socialist realism and can be seen not only as an illustrated manual of workers' self–management, but also as a new Biblia pauperum because it, with a large number of pictures, illustrates the basic, but for most readers incomprehensible, ideological theses of communism. This very luxurious magazine with a clear message, printed in parallel in French, English and German, in one of its last numbers in 1958, together with Puniša Perović's text, “The Personality and Society” carries a brilliant visual manipulation. The entire virtual context can be seen as the prototype and model of the “work” of ideology in the sphere of mass visual communications. This model has, like many others, been precisely analyzed by the Russian avant–garde, and, besides Mayakovsky's and Tarabukin's, we should also include here Eisenstein's view on this subject, which is more than instructive, for it warns that the “apparent arbitrariness of this material relative to the status quo of nature is much less arbitrary than it seems”, for photography allows “any degree of deformation – either as a technical inevitability or a deliberately calculated effect.” ⁹⁷

    Having already in the first sentence drawn the reader's attention to the fact that the topic is “too complex”, the author of “The Personality and Society” had to enlist the aid of a photograph i.e. picture. On the basis of carefully selected photographic portraits and reproductions, a visual parallel was drawn between medieval and contemporary man, since in the spirit of dialectical Marxism it was important to proffer patent proof of the substantially changed position of man in communism, which is a consequence of the transformed ownership of the means of production. Opposite St. Sylvester from a 14 th century reliquary is reproduced a portrait of a worker in a steam boiler works; a peasant woman from Slavonia is reflected like in a mirror in the image of a woman from the 14 th century from a fresco in the King's Church in Studenica; Apostle John from Sopoćani monastery is placed in a position of apparent similarity with a girl pupil at an athletic rally in Zagreb.

	Тошо Дабац, Учесница на гимнаестради у Загребу, 1958. Tošo Dabac, A Participant in the Gymnastics Rally in Zagreb, 1958

    The narrative of “arbitrary” visual comparisons and inter–textual “cross–wording” in the form of silent movies, through the editing of different frames, adjusts the meaning of selected pictures and constructs a real allegory at the semantic level. These photographs, where examples of medieval art have also been translated into the structure of mechanical reproduction, merit that we recall the well–known view that the “… one of the essential characteristics of the filmed image is its eternal presence.” ⁹⁸ Normally, pictures in the era of mechanical reproduction promote a sense of the specific feeling of time, but some traditional pictures as well, oils on canvas, possessed the same kind of ability because they strove to retain and extend some quite banal gestures “till the end of time and the world”. Thus, in Vermeer's pictures girls are permanently, for centuries now, pouring milk or reading a letter, while in all likelihood, it will take Bresson's stroller just as much time to jump over the puddle in the street. Photography, like the camera obscura, with which Vermeer also was familiar, can most efficiently arrest and freeze time at an ideal moment - the cigarette in the mouth of the worker in the boiler works is still burning and the girl is nibbling at her finger at a math class in a gesture similar to that of the Mother of God in the basilica in Poreč from the 6 th century. Mechanical reproduction, as visual material in the process of symbolization and allegorization, simply equalizes historic–sty-listic codes of art, effaces the borders between sacral and profane, public and private, between past and present, and ultimately – between reality and fiction. The photograph, like the icon, knows only one tense – the present tense. The history of man and society, as illustrated by the tableau “The Personality and Society”, is condensed and cramped between two extremes: on the one hand, the dialectical contradiction between the person and society, illustrated by the text; on the other a visual confrontation ofopposite poles fixated on typified heroes – St. Sylvester and the worker in the boiler works, for instance.

    Photographs of working people, the face of the “little man”, plucked out of the context of everyday anonymity, engage in a visual dialogue with “icons”, images of medieval religious art – thereby profaning the context of the sacral or elevating to the level of religiosity a mechanical picture of banal everyday life. For, it is not only the art of socialist realism that is the field in which the virtual context of the propaganda message is constructed, but it is also the heritage of the cultural and stylistic past. However, we should not forget that time is the key element manipulated in the context of communism. This surreal encounter of mutually distant realities is not motivated exclusively by the aesthetic impulse, that specific eclecticism is, rather, in the service of the ideological propaganda of the heroized new man, which is based on an awareness of the end of history – the past and present are adjusted so as to represent a mythologized future. We can speak about mythologized time on the basis of Barthes's view that “myth deprives the object of any Histories. In it, history evaporates.” ⁹⁹

    If we go back to the motto of this chapter and Tarabukin's observation “…But the truly naturalistic photograph is too bland for advertising pur-poses…” ¹⁰⁰, then praiseworthy is the effort of the editorial desk of the Jugoslavija magazine, as well as of the news photographers (Tošo Dabac and Mladen Grčević) to disguise, in a way, “purely naturalistic” i.e. portrait photography and subsume it under the narrative of a complex aesthetic–po-litical metaphor. The construction of a visual allegory, just like of a textual and inter–textual one, is one of the key norms in the language of the art of socialist realism. In that respect there hardly exists a photographic depiction of a hero without the appertaining accoutrements: a young lad and an old man are running with the relay baton, a soldier has a rifle, a miner a pick, a worker a hammer, a female cooperative farmer a sickle, a pioneer a red pioneers' scarf, etc. All of them are extracted from the narrow context of the naturalistic portrait, to be translated, after a successful process of depersonalization, into a social type, a representative of their class and gender affiliation. We should not think that typologization codices are avoided by stating the name of the portrayed model in the caption, such as for instance: “Radmila Biševac, metalworker in the railroad cars factory in Rankovićevo”, by Hristifor Nastasić or “Nikola Škobić”, by Milorad Jojić. Typified models, even when in the forefront with their names and surnames, are both through photographic procedures and even more through captions, the concrete visualization of the function and class position which a hero of labor occupies in society. Radmila is a metalworker, says the caption, while Nikola is a miner, we read on the basis of the attributes, they have abandoned anonymity in order to promote shock–work; rather than being Radmila and Nikola, they are woman and man comrades, class–types, heroized representatives of the new man in the agitprop epoch.

    In that connection the question inevitably arises of why, for years and decades after the successful revolution, one and the same pictures of revolutionaries and spectacular historic offensives were reproduced. Part of the complex answer to that question can be sought in the sphere of symbolization and allegorization of the revolution on which the legitimacy of the new authorities rested. Visual evocation of the heroes of the revolution, “national heroes”, as the official appellation went, was also supposed to refresh, from time to time, the collective memory of the ideals of the revolution and thus agitate for their successors. Pictures of heroes who sacrificed even their very lives for the success of the grandiose task of social transformation, had to remain alive, and commemoration rituals, as the unveiling of monuments, the placing of memorial plaques, with photographs reproduced in large numbers, were a segment of the self–propaganda mechanism of the Communist Party ensuring the continuity of rule and revitalizing the creative and avant–garde role of the Party in society.

	Из албума “Жене Словеније”, 1946. From the Album “Women of Slovenia”, 1946

    Georgij (Žorž) Skrigin's famous photograph Zbeg /Refugees/, taken in 1943, has been printed in widely circulated textbooks and newspapers so many times that it belongs to the very core of the collective visual memory of Yugoslav communism. Here, it can be a representative example of both the dissemination of the myth of the heroine and of a radical reform of the documentary values of mechanical representation. At first glance, the basic semantic plane relies on the picture of a lone mother in a barren landscape, carrying one child on her back and leading another by the hand. The photograph was exhibited and published not only after the end of the war but also many years later, “during the years devoured by grasshoppers”, as Borislav Pekić called them, but not always under the same title. However, what is even more important is that it is not always one and the same picture. Its rhetoric changed and was complemented, not least by its being assigned different captions: once it is only the short explanation: “Refugees”, while at another time it is specifically emphasized that the shot was taken at Knežopolje. “Captions have an important characteristic” says the already quoted theoretician of photography Macarol: Photography as such possesses predominantly propaganda features, while the caption has a predominantly agitating effect”.¹⁰¹ Not only does the caption as an agitating tool focus the attention of the viewer outside the field of vision, but the photograph and accompanying text are viewed in the context of the complex rhetoric of the picture. Such ideas are practically identical to Barthes's analysis in the well–known essay The Rhetoric of the Picture. With a view to successfully conveying the visual message, it is justified, as Oto Bihalji Merin also believed, to design not only variants in the textual plane, but also the entire virtual context, as was done in the case of the inter–textual segment “The Personality and Society”, for the same has been done in every properly designed advertising campaign to this very date. It is in the same semeiological plane that we should view Skrigin's photograph Refugees, where he develops, using the deeply–moving verses of Skender Kulenović's poem Stojanka majka Knežopoljka, an inter–textual structure on the pages of the magazine Jugoslavija. Subsequent editing of the picture and the poetic text which originally came into being independently of one another, constructs a new narration, a truthful allegory – Mother Courage.¹⁰²

	Станоје Бојовић, Јурукиње, Бања Лука, 1957. Stanoje Bojović, Jurukinje, Banja Luka, 1957

    If a photograph is an index, if it registers presence and if it establishes a firm link between the visual form and the subject or object it represents, then its authenticity can hardly be doubted. But, on the basis of that essential verisimilitude, the visual message can imperceptibly be transformed and constructed employing the method of photomontage by combining, for instance, two or more photographs, i.e., by virtually merging two or more separate situations. When in Skrigin's photograph Refugees dark and heavy clouds appear above the lone mother with her children, that is not only a sign of the dramatic climax of the tragedy, but also of the accepted knowledge that photomontage is the new language of the modern society of the picture, i.e. of the spectacle. We know that avant–garde circles, from cubist collages to futurist, dadaist, surrealist ones, primarily the representatives of the Russian avant–garde, considered photomontage the synonym of a radically new optic. Namely, it would be hard to believe that the photograph Refugees is anything else but a document – authentic testimony of the tragic aspects of civil war. But, when we compare two photographs which are identical only at a first and cursory glance, and when in addition we know that Skrigin, the cameraman of the first communist film – Slavica – was unquestionably very familiar with the effects of photomontage, we must conclude that the heavy clouds in the background of the photograph Refugees have been edited in subsequently. The photograph, which once does not have and another time has clouds in the background, departs from naturalism and blurs the borders between real and fictional. “…photomontage is not the language of truth but a language of fiction,” ¹⁰³ and the confrontation of different fragmentary pictures makes for staging and constructing a propaganda context, towards the propaganda of ideology.

     In one of his numerous aphorisms, Godard claimed that photography was the truth and that film was the truth twenty–four times over, which is certainly true in principle. The process of photomontage is somewhere half–way between photography and film, so that the photograph Refugees could be said to be truth doubled, i.e. a doubly coded mythical representation of mother. Among the myths of heroines in communism, the mother myth occupies a prominent place. The mother mythologem is a stereotype which is varied in different media, i.e. motherhood is the principal social function of woman at the global level of the art of socialist realism. This new wom-an–mother is pregnant, but a smile has been captured on her face while she sows crops with a man at the cooperative estate in Kačarevo in 1949. It is a strong, brave and gentle mother, like in the photograph Refugees or in the picture of Djordje Andrejević Kun The Mother (1937), because she is capable of working in the field alone and, as the mother in the Refugees, of “raising and caring for a new generation of fighters for socialism on her own, fulfilling responsibly the tasks of her class •  – she feeds and educates new people for the new epoch.” ¹⁰⁴

Из албума “Градитељи Омладинске пруге Шамац– Сарајево“, 1947. From the Album: Builders of the Šamac–Sarajevo Youth Railroad Line, 1947

Сетва у Сељачкој радној задрузи “Црвени пролетер” у Качареву, 1949. Sowing in the “Crveni proleter” Farming Cooperative in Kačarevo, 1949

Воће на црногорској обали, 1954. Fruit on the Montenegrin Coast, 1954

    In addition to the mythologized concept of the new “Mother Courage”, the photography of socialist realism also insists on the image of the heroine of labor, patterned on the male hero. That the building of the new society and the fulfillment of the Five–Year Plan do not know of gender, but only class discrimination is confirmed by the composition on yet another page of the 1949 Jugoslavija magazine. This tableau of labor directs the gaze of the observer to visual fragments documenting the new relations between the sexes in socialist society – the woman, a hero of labor, has the same position as the man, she can do every last job he can – including the tempering and welding of steel. The image of the new woman, as in the picture by Božo Ilić or in numerous photographs in socialist realism, just like the image of the new man, is a functionalized representation of the building of the new society. Irrespective of the traditional distribution of work, the woman is no longer only a housewife, but is represented as an active architect of the new future. Consequently, the heroine of labor takes on other social roles and positions of institutionalized social power as well: she is a member of the AFŽ (Anti–Fascist Front of Women), she can be minister, but also carry the baton and take part in a mass spectacle in a stadium or city square. That woman's right to suffrage is guaranteed by the Constitution and she is not a marginalized subject in the communist society.¹⁰⁵ On the contrary, since creativity is not something belonging exclusively to men, the art of socialist realism articulates the myth of the heroine in two equally important semantic fields: that of revolution and that of labor. A thus “framed” concept of woman is perpetuated and lives on for the duration of her culturological position of “woman comrade”. The woman, i.e. “woman comrade” is represented in the art of socialist realism as an equal repository of institutional power as a “comrade”. In the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which particularly glorifies the concept of the heroine, exceptions are photographs such as Miodrag Djordjević's Branka (1957) or Toša Dabac's On a Dubrovnik Terrace in the Afternoon (1950), in which the perception of woman, the object of man's gaze, is renewed in the traditional framework of fetishist male standards. But, we should not forget that “ideology is never more apparently at work than when questions of class are extended by questions of gender in the production of pictures of femininity.” ¹⁰⁶

    We have already stated that the official art of communism is asexual, but there are exceptions, as confirmed by the above two examples, as well as by some other “tourist” and “alpinist” photographs.¹⁰⁷ Wedged between contradictory requirements to portray the mythical image of the new man and his place in the collective realistically, in a naturalistic manner, the photography of socialist realism constructed a mass ornament from the multitude of people in a stadium or a unique ornament when it symbolically registered the presence of man against the backdrop of his grandiose achievement. The Ornament of Power is the name of Danilo Gagović's photograph from 1954. It could be the ideal visual representation of one of Kracauer's famous essays on popular culture printed in the book Mass Ornament (1995). Not only is it difficult to see the face of the new man under the military helmet on it, on other photos it is hidden behind the welder's mask. It is also barely discernible in counter–light or is an almost invisible pattern on the grandiose dam photographed by Milan Pavić in 1954. The body, both of the mass and individual, is the material used to shape the ornament of power in totalitarianism. Traces of eroticism have vanished, believes Kracauer, because the enormous number of participants is united by identical movements in the mass spectacle. But traces of the erotic are lost also because the individual faces and bodies of the man in communism are not the basis for shaping aesthetic but moral and ideological visual messages. Photography, just like literature, film or painting, does not speak about a body of flesh and blood, it is in the service of articulating the myth of the new hero. The message of Aleksandar Deyneka's 1933 poster The Female Athlete is: to work, to build and never complain.¹⁰⁸ If labor was traditionally associated with pain and suffering and if Marxism offered the key for a different understanding of labor, both female and male, then the photograph of socialist realism does not attempt to represent just another iconographic variant of Adam and Eve, but seeks to shape a utopia of revolutionary labor which emancipates man.¹⁰⁹