New article published just now: "FIAP Biennial in Photokina 1956: A Revolt Against the Universal Language of Photography,” The Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones 26 (2019): 120-146. My article is included in a special thematic issue "The Medium of the Exhibition" of the journal The Notebook for Art, Theory and Related Zones (Sešit pro Umění, Teorii a Příbuzné Zóny), a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by The Academic Research Centre of the Academy of Fine Arts (VVP AVU) in Prague, Czech Republic.
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Abstract:
Photography is a universal language, “understood on all five continents, irrespective of race, creed, culture or social level”—this announcement by Maurice van de Wyer, the president of the International Federation of Photographic Art (Fédération internationale de l'art photographique, FIAP), echoed numerous other assertions made at the opening of the fifth annual photography trade fair and exhibition complex Photokina 1956 in Cologne, West Germany, from September 29 to October 7, 1956. The leaders of the U.S. and West Germany, international organizations such as UN and UNESCO, photography industry, and transnational community of photographers united in FIAP all praised photography as a universal language. Photokina 1956, however, revealed two radically different understandings of such a language. On one hand, it denoted Western European and U.S. magazine photography whose success and popularity was driven by the market forces of the publishing and photo industries as well as by the support from politicians. On the other, it entailed numerous, idiosyncratic visual languages coming from photographers from thirty-six countries in Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa represented in the fourth FIAP Biennial, which was included in the program of Photokina 1956. This article views the intervention of FIAP in the Photokina 1956 exhibition through a sociological lens that focuses on the contested social status of photographers and the power inequality in postwar photography.
