Perspectives on nationess: Photography as a ‘nation building’ tool
- Submitting institution
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University of Sunderland
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 1297
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- -
- Brief description of type
- Exhibition and 2 book chapters
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2020
- URL
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http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/12512/
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The exhibition Portrayals of History investigated how postwar Greek documentary photography functioned as ‘a nation-building tool’ in foreign interventionist activities and in indigenous attempts to construct a national identity during political turmoil and an exportable tourist image. At a time of questioning national and European identities, as well as with reference to the global migrant crisis, quite pronounced in Greece, Moschovi proposed to exhibit the work of Papaioannou and Harissiadis, who depicted the nation’s plight during WWII and the Civil War and subsequently the country’s postwar reconstruction, as a counter example to contemporary curatorial approaches illustrating the ‘Greek crisis’.
Expanding on the shifts in the postwar use of documentary photography as a tool for building idea(l)s of nationess, identified in “Greece as Photograph”, Moschovi argued that their work introduced an idiomatic form of social documentary photography, which appropriated the immediacy of photojournalism in staged photographs using photographic verisimilitude to authenticate their briefs. Referencing “This is Greece”, Moschovi articulated how the photographers reimagined a romantic, pre-industrial picture of Greece/Greekness for tourist campaigns.
Moschovi suggested a materialist approach using the photographers’ unpublished contact sheets, archival material, and original publications to expose the ideological undercurrents and challenge the credibility of the photographic document as a historical record. By making available for the first time this archival material (e.g. the photographers’ hand-made books of the Athens famine never presented as a whole), the exhibition offered a better understanding of parts of history that were censored as well as the role of photography in constructing official histories to visitors and the 264 high-school pupils, 226 university students and 82 adult learners from local, national and international institutions who benefited from the educational programme. This impact is evidenced in the comment of an NYU student: ‘Now I know why my grandmother is always sad’.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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