Suchergebnisse

Abstract
In early twentieth-century Russia, a disastrous war and social revolution shook the foundations of the imperial state, unleashing the press from censorship and demanding innovation in media coverage. At this very moment, new photographic technology was democratizing access and making high-quality reproductions affordable. This article explores how photography responded to and visualized the unprecedented political violence that engulfed Russia during the Revolution of 1905. Situating this "war at home" in a global context of early commercial and humanitarian photography of violence, it charts the emergence of distinctive visual regimes and spectatorial practices. As photographs made political violence visible within an unruly public sphere, they spotlighted some forms of violence and occluded others. Visual frames and narratives shaped new modes of representation and spectatorship, including regimes of commemoration, documentation, sensationalism, and forensics. This article opens with the most conventional photographic form, the studio portrait, and shows how it became imbricated with the political struggle and a forum for contesting the status of victim and martyr. The second section considers how the illustrated press crafted the terrorist bombing as a visual spectacle, using images with paratext to tell different kinds of stories. Shifting focus from the event to the body, the final section analyzes explicit photographs of the corpse. By exposing the violated body to the public gaze, these photographs posed a question fundamental to modernity, capitalism, and photography: who counts as fully human? This case study concludes with reflections on the categories of proximity and distance in the photography of violence. While the revolution was suppressed by 1907, it inaugurated a vibrant era of mass culture, capitalist consumption, and cultural pessimism, in which photography and film would play increasingly dominant roles.

In early twentieth-century Russia, personal health became a commodity in a rapidly expanding commercial culture. As medical services and products (patent medicines, gadgets, self-help books) became widely available, new advertising strategies played upon both the threat of disease and the promise of health and well-being. This marketplace helped to feed new ideas about individual and social health, including such modern concepts as life-style choices. It also promoted competing models of the modern self: images of the weak and enervated victim of modern life were countered by visions of a healthy, strong, and controlled subject, able to master life forces. Focusing upon the disease construct of neurasthenia, Susan K. Morrissey explores how "nervousness" became a mass diagnosis and an emblem of the modern era—both its illnesses and its potential for regeneration. The making of a modern social sphere, Morrissey argues, depended not just on (professional) claims to specialized knowledge and broader political forces but also on commercial culture itself.