Visual Media at Face Value: Non-Professional 20th-century Portraits and Photographs

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The historian Pierre Nora theorizes how “sites of memory” emerge retrospectively when history ossifies and organizes a reified moment, in turn manipulated by retroactive consciousness. Not limited to geospatial locations, these sites reveal a certain type of relationship with or mode of relating to the past. Attentive to these questions of a consciousness of a collective past and the construction of cultural memory, this panel asks the following question: how can visual media alter and expand our understanding of artistic identity and cultural memory? The papers of this panel consider the visual art practices of artists typically associated with other forms of art: 1) whether the ethnographic photographs and writings of the painter Viktor Ufimtsev; 2) the paintings of the iconic singer and actor Viktor Tsoi; 3) or the photographs of the physician and writer Leonid Tsypkin, these visual works reveal another facet to the artists’ creative visions renderable in these forms, as opposed to their primarily remembered or associated methods. By bringing these diverse case studies together and focusing attention on their visual media, this panel challenges the narrow or narrowing memory of these artists as merely a painter, singer, or writer instead underscoring the complexity of their creative visions and the ways these parallel practices expand their artistic identities.

Sub Unit

• Arts I: Visual Culture, Material Culture, Applied and Fine Arts

Papers

• The Samarkand Everyday: Viktor Ufimtsev’s Search for the Orient - E L

• A Tale of Two Cities: Leonid Tsypkin’s Street Photography - Eric Kim, Stanford U

Discussant

• Samuel Proffitt Driver, Dickinson College