Reality, precisely because it is that and because it is beyond our individual minds, may reach them only by multiplying itself into a thousand faces and a thousand images.

H. Ortega y Gaset

     The book “Photography and Propaganda” links or edits the ideas of Yugoslav avant–garde groups, above all the surrealists, and then also those rallied around the paper Nova literatura (New Literature), with the agitation and propaganda culture based on the thesis advanced by Boris Groys in his work The Total Art of Stalinism, Avant–Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (1992). Essentially, the book explores and delves into the theme of the rhetoric of photography from 1945 to 1958, which, on the one hand, is articulated in the magazines Nadrealizam danas i ovde (NDIO) (Surrealism Here and Now) and Nova literatura, while focusing on the spectacle of mechanical images of the new socialist society on the other. Not only the textual and visual narration but also the layout of the book follow this analytical line. We can say right away that the visual messages employed in the magazine NDIO, and in particular the photograph: “Imagination in the Service of Propaganda” were the cornerstone i.e. the igniting spark of the adventure of rethinking photography in the agitprop era. It was, in a sense, hypothetically taken as the matrix of a new popular culture that was directly transplanted from the Soviet into the Yugoslav milieu, in 1932, as a visionary harbinger of a future that had already begun in the agitation and propaganda era if it is perceived as a society of the spectacle of images.

    As always, it took a while for the idea about this book to ferment and the theme articulation to run its course. In a way, the book is a part of the by now many years of research devoted to the photographic medium, but it is in no way “the second volume” of the History of Serbian Photography 1839–1940, my book published in 1993. “Photography and Propaganda” does not follow the photography of socialist realism in linear fashion, meaning chronologically and systematically, but aims at establishing some basic principles of pictorial communication in the agitprop era, i.e. the semantic plane of photography as a visual language. In the context of the totalitarian socialist culture, photography was for the first time awarded the position of a mass medium configured institutionally within the Popular Engineering Society, and its visual message, apart from in the aesthetic, functioned equally successfully also at the ideological reformation level. Given such an engagement of photography and the creative zeal of the photographers, most of whom did not even think it important for the photographs to bear their signatures, I ran the risk of being snowed under an avalanche of preserved photographs in museums, archives, the TANJUG Agency, the press files of, primarily, the papers Komunist, Jugoslavija–SSSR, Jugoslavija, and Borba, but also in a number of private collections.¹ However, it is important for the reader to know that the selection of the visual material reviewed was not made with the intention of providing a comprehensive overview of the Yugoslav photographic production from 1945 to 1958, nor that of representing the best pieces of the epoch or identifying the principal authorial approaches in photography or in the broader ambit of the art of socialist realism; it was based on the subjective assessment that analysis of photography as a mass visual communication language would reveal the mechanisms of its ideological instrumentalization. That is why I took into consideration, primarily, works that had been subjected to some form of official selection, i.e. images that were reproduced en masse or “chosen” to remain in albums of collective memory because their rhetoric was compatible with the aesthetic–ideological principles of the totalitarian culture. In other words, the study deals only with the official art of photography, and according to Michel Ragon: “In Yugoslavia living art is at the same time official art.” ²

    “It is easy to view the engagement of art with derision today”, wrote Argan in 1957, namely at a time when traces of the revolutionary ideology in Yugoslav photography were still clearly legible.³ At the time, he asserted that we could not revert to the old argument of the treachery of believers and that engaged art was not making “an unforgivable ideological mistake”, but, rather, was responding to a historical necessity. My research, which involved looking over tens of thousands of photographs, led me to the conclusion that no era before the agitprop one had been as “photogenic”. It is also important to bear in mind that never before or after had the photographic image featured as a self–conscious mass visual medium putting its rhetoric in the service of propagating the utopist idea of the building of the new man.

    The book that is before you, even though it deals with the tactics of visual pronouncements, does not aspire to agitate either in favor or against the ideology of communism. It is a modest attempt at conceptualizing basic visual narratives and rhetorical norms arrived at with the aid of the limited methods of cultural archaeology. In the course of the “excavation” of photographs, little about which is known today, I had the valuable assistance of many cultural establishments, and I am particularly indebted to the “Svetozar Marković” University Library, The National Library of Serbia, The Archives of Yugoslavia, and the Museum of the History of Yugoslavia in Belgrade. The advice and support of Vesna Danilović, Sarita Vujković, Divna Vuksanović, Biljana Velašević, Ksenija Nikčević, Ljilja Knežević, Bojana Popović, Zorica Netaj, Bojana Melcer, Brana Tomić, Miloš Jurišić, Miško Šuvaković, as well as of my own family were, as always, an immeasurable input to the final shaping of the book. From the very start, the book was conceived so as to have little text and lots of pictures, but, even so, the most difficult thing was to select the photographs that would “tendentiously”, i.e. from quite fragmentary visual clips, put together a picture of the agitprop culture which is being consigned to oblivion without us in fact having taken a proper look at it.