Family Photographs in Communist Albania: State Photography and the Private Sphere
The aim of this paper is to present the first results of an on-going research project on the social uses of photography in communist Albania. If we are interested in official and propaganda photography, we would like to focus here on a less known aspect of photography in Albania, family photography. Social sciences have long been interested in the relationship between family and photography and it is established that photography tells a lot about family forms and kinship relations. Family albums are narratives; they tell the story of the family and produce an image of the family. We would like to question this image in the context of communist Albania, in which both photography and family were subject to political representations and practices.
Visual Culture in Communist Albania: Photography and Photographers at the Time of the Stockmann-Sokoli Expedition (1957)
The Stockmann-Sokoli expedition of summer 1957 resulted in the collection of photographs taken before and during the ethnomusicologistsʼ trip in Southern Albania by Wilfried Fiedler, the linguist of the team. This set of several hundred photographs in colour and black-and-white is a valuable testimony of the kind of images of communist Albania that were emerging at that time. In this chapter, I take as a pretext the photographic collection of Wilfried Fiedler, in its content and in its conditions of production, to analyse the situation of Albanian photography in 1957. For this, I begin by presenting the collection and its context, i.e. Albania and its relations with the Communist world before 1961. I then turn to the situation of contemporary Albanian photography to highlight the specificities of Wilfried Fiedler’s photographs and dwell on a determining criterion: colour. I conclude with considerations on photography and modernity.
A l'assaut du pouvoir
Au moment ou eclate la Seconde Guerre mondiale, en Albanie les survivances feodales sont encore tres prononcees : il n'y a pas de classe ouvriere mais des petits et moyens proprietaires terriens. Si l'on s'en tient a la doctrine marxiste, rien ne justifiait l'instauration d'un regime communiste. Pour l'historien, il s'agit d'un phenomene paradoxal