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.
Au service du peuple. Coopératives et entreprises de photographes dans l’Albanie communiste (1944-1991)
Entre 1944 et 1990, certains pays de l’aire mediterraneenne ont experimente des systemes politiques et economiques inspires du modele sovietique dans lesquels les notions de « service public » et de « bien commun » occupaient une place centrale. C’est le cas en Albanie. Ce chapitre porte sur la mise en œuvre de la notion de « service public » dans l’Albanie communiste et s’appuie pour cela sur l’observation d’un domaine d’activite precis, la photographie. Des 1946, des cooperatives de photographes sont creees dans les grandes villes pour instaurer un service a la population concurrencant les photographes prives. Ceux-ci sont interdits d’activite au debut des annees 1960 et, quelques annees plus tard, les cooperatives sont elles-memes transformees en entreprises etatiques dont la mission est explicitement qualifiee de « service public » (sherbim publik). Nous chercherons, a partir d’un corpus d’images photographiques considere sous l’angle de la production et des usages, a retracer l’histoire de la photographie de service public en Albanie, de ses debuts jusqu’a ses transformations dans la periode post-communiste. Ce faisant, nous esperons contribuer a une meilleure comprehension du fonctionnement de l’Etat dit « totalitaire » et de la place qu’y occupe la notion de « service public », tout en resituant l’experience communiste au sein de l’aire mediterraneenne.
Communist History: An Annual Bibliography (2005)
The subject of this bibliography is the scholarly literature of communist history. For the USA coverage is extensive. For the rest of the Anglophone world coverage is selective, while coverage for the rest of the world is more selective still. Coverage of the former and presently communist countries is largely limited to works dealing with the Communist parties of those countries. Anti-communism is covered selectively, with somewhat more emphasis on its interaction with communism than its nature as a movement/ideology per se. Coverage of related topics, i.e. the labor movement, Marxism, other strains of radicalism, etc., is highly selective and limited to items directly relevant to communism. For coverage of current reportage (newspapers, news weeklies, journals of opinion, Internet/WWW discussion lists, etc.) see the Newsletter of the Historians of American Communism and the Historians of American Communism Discussion List (h-hoac@h-net.msu.edu). The Bibliography is organized into seven sections, listed below. Sections 1–5 are form and genre based (monographs, serials, etc.), while sections 6 and 7 are format based (sound and visual, electronic). Entries are arranged alphabetically within each section. Where the number of entries warrants it, a section is divided into USA and Other. There is no index. Please be aware that most citations for items in electronic format are listed under their appropriate form/genre, i.e. articles in electronic serials are listed under serials. Section 7 (Internet, WWW, etc.) only contains citations for items in forms and genres irreducibly unique to the electronic environment, i.e. discussion lists (and postings and threads therein) and for those web sites and other electronic resources not subsumed under categories 1–7. Items cited are from the calendar year in the title of the Bibliography, with two exceptions, Internet/WWW items, where publication/creation date information is often unavailable or indeterminate, and older items not cited