"FIAP Biennial in Photokina 1956: A Revolt Against the Universal Language of Photography,” The Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones 26 (2019): 120-146.
My article is included in a special thematic issue "The Medium of the Exhibition" of the journal The Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones (Sešit pro Umění, Teorii a Příbuzné Zóny), a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by The Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts (VVP AVU) in Prague, Czech Republic.
Download the pdf of my article here.
The initial version of the draft was delivered to the editors on January 15, 2018. The final version, published in the fall 2019, has significantly benefited from the comments and suggestions from two anonymous peer reviewers as well as those from the journal’s most attentive and careful editors, Anežka Bartlová and Martin Škabraha.
Read more about the journal and its special issue in English here, and in Czech here.
Abstract:
Photography is a universal language, “understood on all five continents, irrespective of race, creed, culture or social level”—this announcement by Maurice van de Wyer, the president of the International Federation of Photographic Art (Fédération internationale de l'art photographique, FIAP) echoed numerous other assertions made at the opening of the fifth annual photography trade fair and exhibition complex Photokina 1956, which took place in Cologne, West Germany, from September 29 to October 7, 1956.
Trade fair section of Photokina 1956, Cologne.
The leaders of the U.S. and West Germany, international organizations such as UN and UNESCO, photography industry, and transnational community of photographers united in FIAP all praised photography as a universal language. Photokina 1956, however, revealed two radically different understandings of such a language. On one hand, it denoted Western European and U.S. magazine photography whose success and popularity was driven by the market forces of the publishing and photo industries as well as by the support from politicians.
UNESCO photography exhibition at Photokina 1956. Photo: Charles E. Fraser.
Magnum exhibition in Photokina 1956. Photo: Charles E. Fraser.
On the other, it entailed numerous, idiosyncratic visual languages coming from photographers from thirty-six countries in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa represented in the fourth FIAP Biennial, which was included in the program of Photokina 1956. For these photographers, universal was their shared understanding of photographic art as an idealistic pursuit of self-expression that exists strictly outside the market. This article views the intervention of FIAP and reasons of its failure in the Photokina 1956 exhibition through a sociological lens that focuses on the contested social status of photographers and the power inequality in postwar photography.
Read more—download the article pdf!
Abstract in Czech:
Read more—download the abstract in Czech as pdf, and download the full article (in English) as pdf!
NB!
If you’re interested in Czech postwar art and culture, check out the just-published The Sešit Reader. The First Ten Years of Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones 2007–2017 (2019, ISBN 978-80-87108-92-5) with introductory articles by Viktor Misiano and Sven Spieker. According to the editors of the journal, “The selection of texts from the first ten years of Notebook offers both a comprehensive overview of the transformations to have taken place in Czech culture since the Second World War and contributions to current debates taking place on an international level in the sphere of art and theory.”