Developing Socialism: The Photographic Condition of Architecture in Romania, 1958-1970

摘要

In Romania during the 1960s, photography was used systematically to expose a large audience to the mass housing projects commissioned on a vast scale by the socialist state. Photographs illustrating all aspects of the new architecture, from facade close-ups to sweeping aerial views of large housing districts, came to dominate a range of printed materials that circulated both domestically and abroad. In this article, I argue that the photographs, although documentary in appearance, nonetheless constituted powerful tools of visual propaganda. Photographic compositions allowed one to read otherwise neutral buildings as manifestations of the collectivism and modernity sought by the socialist state. Ultimately, by comparing photography with paintings of architecture, I argue for an expanded definition of socialist realism that could include the photographic language deployed during that decade in a magazine such as Arhitectura.