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.
What was socialism, and what comes next?
Among the first anthropologists to work in Eastern Europe, Katherine Verdery had built up a significant base of ethnographic and historical expertise when the major political transformations in the region began to take place. In this collection of essays dealing with the aftermath of Soviet-style socialism and the different forms that may replace it, she explores the nature of socialism in order to understand more fully its consequences. By analyzing her primary data from Romania and Transylvania and synthesizing information from other sources, Verdery lends a distinctive anthropological perspective to a variety of themes common to political and economic studies on the end of socialism: themes such as "civil society," the creation of market economies, privatization, national and ethnic conflict, and changing gender relations.Under Verdery's examination, privatization and civil society appear not only as social processes, for example, but as symbols in political rhetoric. The classic pyramid scheme is not just a means of enrichment but a site for reconceptualizing the meaning of money and an unusual form of post-Marxist millenarianism. Land being redistributed as private property stretches and shrinks, as in the imaginings of the farmers struggling to tame it. Infused by this kind of ethnographic sensibility, the essays reject the assumption of a transition to capitalism in favor of investigating local processes in their own terms.