Zis sounds like eh vinner

[Kevin]

Utopie und Wirklichkeit
East German Photography 1956-1989
http://www.forum-fotografie.info/pub_02.asp

Apparantly photography was free to proliferate in the DDR, which was not true for literature and painting. Has anyone seen this book?

 

[Jocko]

I haven't seen this book - but I do collect communist era photographic books from the former eastern bloc, as I wanted to learn what people did with their FEDs! It's true that from the mid-50s on photography was apparently freer than other arts. The usual criticism of "formalism" (roughly a preference for style/technique over content) seemingly did not apply, although an "optimistic" tone is pretty much universal.

I recently acquired an interesting book - Portratfotographie by Klaus Fischer (Leipzig, 1980) - which is fairly typical. It includes a couple of "party" shots - Honecker and some FDJ girls - as if to fulfill a quota for ideological content - but the vast bulk of the book features work that compares well to similar western titles of the time (say, Hattersley's excellent "Beginner's Guide to Photographing People") and would fit quite happily in this forum.