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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2021

Photography and Régime d’historicité. Past, Present, and Future in Two Photographic Albums on Communist Albania

Résumé

Photography has a strong and complex relation to time, especially but not exclusively due to its ability to bring images of the past into the present. In this chapter, I consider the case of photographs produced during the communist period in Albania. Generally speaking, Albanian photography of that time can be seen as a tool in the hands of state authorities for building the new socialist society: one of its roles was to visualize the coming of new times and of a foreseeable future. It also created a common space with which everyone could identify, so that it was both a matter of (temporal) rupture and (spatial) continuity. After 1991, the status of these photographs radically changed, and they largely disappeared from public space. They however started to bear new significations as historical objects and images and, as such, constitute a case study for the analysis of conceptions of time and space during and after the communist period. In this chapter, I question the meaning and value of these photographs in contemporary Albania and ask what part of the communist (or pre-communist) past they carry and visualize. In order to conduct such an analysis, I will specifically examine two photographic albums published in Albania in recent years. Both are dedicated to photographs from the communist period. One is published by a former prominent propaganda photographer and aims at giving an overview of his career (Kumi 2013). The second one presents the work of much lesser-known photographers active in the northeastern town of Kukës (Dokle 2014). Beyond their differences, both albums share common features such as the remitting of images from the communist past of Albania. They also constitute a reinterpretation and reevaluation of images that were first intended to visualize the present of communist Albania and to envision its future, but are now conceived of as fragments of the past. The question is whether these images restore sentiments and values from the communist or precommunist past into the present. Relying on François Hartog’s notion of régime d’historicité (Hartog 2003), I also ask whether these albums can be seen as the materialization of a change from one regime to the other. I will look at the way categories of past, present, and future are articulated in the photographs but also in the captions and commentaries accompanying them in the albums. I will also try to understand and compare what kind of experiences of time and what kinds of expectations and sentiments determined both the making of these pictures during the communist period and the publication of the albums twenty-five years after its collapse. In doing so, I will rely on interviews with one of the authors and with other photographers active during the communist period, and more generally on interviews and observations conducted in relation to the presence of these photographs from the past.
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halshs-03192513, version 1 (08-04-2021)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-03192513 , version 1

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Gilles de Rapper. Photography and Régime d’historicité. Past, Present, and Future in Two Photographic Albums on Communist Albania. Nataša Gregorič Bon; Smoki Musaraj. Remitting, Restoring and Building Contemporary Albania, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.51-73, 2021, 978-3-030-84090-7. ⟨halshs-03192513⟩

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