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.
Notes on early photography in Albania
Abstract The manner in which the photographic invention interacted with various societies and national temperaments is undoubtedly one of the most interesting aspects of this field. Very little has been published about the arrival and development of photography in Albania. This article is based in part on conversations with the Albanian photographers Gege Marubi, Piro Milkani and others, in the autumn of 19801.
Carnival of Shame: Doctorow and the Rosenbergs
“Literature can turn language, for the moment at least, against the sentence of death.” Considering the national and international furor provoked by the sensational early 1950's “atom spy” trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, one may be surprised that these dramatic and traumatic events have not inspired more literary artistry than they have. But a prominent playwright, Arthur Miller, did write The Crucible (produced in 1953) in part as a response to the rabid McCarthyism of that era, and two highly regarded novelists in a later decade composed ambitious novels drawing directly on the Rosenberg affair: E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel (1971) and Robert Coover in The Public Burning (1977). In 1987, Sidney Lumet produced the little noticed film Daniel, based on Doctorow's novel, and still more recently Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Angels in America, with Ethel Rosenberg as one of the characters, has been playing on Broadway.