Kat M . H . Reischl
Kat Hill Reischl's research has focused on 20th and 21st century Russian literature, art, and culture, with particular attention paid to the relationship between image and text. Her first book, Photographic Literacy: Cameras in the Hands of Russian Authors, explores the intersection of photography and writing in the texts of author-photographers including Lev Tolstoy, Leonid Andreev, Maksimilian Voloshin, Mikhail Prishvin, Sergei Tret’iakov, Il’ia Ehrenburg, Il’ia Il’f, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Nabokov. Since 2016, Kat has actively working on several digital humanities projects, including a site dedicated to Soviet children's books housed at Princeton’s Cotsen Collection, "Playing Soviet: The Visual Language of Early Soviet Children's Books." https://commons.princeton.edu/soviet/She and a new data-driven analysis of Soviet performance periodicals: https://digitalhumanities.stanford.edu/soviet-periodicals
Her current book project is an intermedial look at color and color technologies in the 20th century, focused largely on the late Soviet period. It is tentatively titled, Beyond Red: Soviet and Post-Soviet Color. Additional areas of research interest include the history of photography, media theory, urban studies, and art history.
Her current book project is an intermedial look at color and color technologies in the 20th century, focused largely on the late Soviet period. It is tentatively titled, Beyond Red: Soviet and Post-Soviet Color. Additional areas of research interest include the history of photography, media theory, urban studies, and art history.
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Books by Kat M . H . Reischl
Papers by Kat M . H . Reischl
However, wielding a camera is but one part of photographic literacy. The photographic avant-garde, largely through the pages of the periodical press, would also teach a viewing public how to read their new world, defamiliarizing everyday objects with extreme close-ups and the cutting and reassembling of photographs into new collaged and montaged worlds. In so doing, modernist photographers, like Rodchenko and other members of the October (Oktiabr’) group, became easy targets in the heated discourses over shifting attitudes towards photographic and textual representation in the 1930s. With the rise of Socialist Realism, the strategies employed in creating and reading photographs were necessarily reformulated, reflecting the central tensions surrounding the visualization of everyday objects, people, and production within the Soviet Union. How can a photograph alone capture the whole of Soviet space—industry, production, peoples? How can a single snapshot capture progress over time, from the ages of backwardness before the revolution to the success of the Five-Year Plans? Just at its moment of greatest saturation in print media, the camera’s limited scope potentially threatened the photographic experiments of both experimental modernists like Rodchenko and the out-of-time and out-of-place Prishvin.
While the work of Margarita Tupitsyn and Erika Wolf has confirmed the extended life of the photographic avant-garde well into the late 1930s, from Rodchenko’s photo-stills to El Lissitzky’s photomontages in USSR in Construction, this article will diversify the representative works and photographers in this Soviet canon to include Mikhail Prishvin. Prishvin, an author writing both for children (young subjects under development) and for adults (subjects undergoing a new transformation), provides an unexpected and heretofore missing primer for understanding the defining trajectory of photographic literacy and the forces shaping visual and textual production in the early Soviet period. In two unconventional lessons, moving from the children’s book to elite journals, we will slow down our perceiving eyes and camera lenses in order to read with expert speed a rapidly changing Soviet present. By learning to read photographically, we gain a new lens through which to view the complex trajectory of Socialist Realist imaging, just as Socialist Realism would become the lens through which authors, artists, and readers would experience the shape of their own worlds.
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Book Reviews by Kat M . H . Reischl
However, wielding a camera is but one part of photographic literacy. The photographic avant-garde, largely through the pages of the periodical press, would also teach a viewing public how to read their new world, defamiliarizing everyday objects with extreme close-ups and the cutting and reassembling of photographs into new collaged and montaged worlds. In so doing, modernist photographers, like Rodchenko and other members of the October (Oktiabr’) group, became easy targets in the heated discourses over shifting attitudes towards photographic and textual representation in the 1930s. With the rise of Socialist Realism, the strategies employed in creating and reading photographs were necessarily reformulated, reflecting the central tensions surrounding the visualization of everyday objects, people, and production within the Soviet Union. How can a photograph alone capture the whole of Soviet space—industry, production, peoples? How can a single snapshot capture progress over time, from the ages of backwardness before the revolution to the success of the Five-Year Plans? Just at its moment of greatest saturation in print media, the camera’s limited scope potentially threatened the photographic experiments of both experimental modernists like Rodchenko and the out-of-time and out-of-place Prishvin.
While the work of Margarita Tupitsyn and Erika Wolf has confirmed the extended life of the photographic avant-garde well into the late 1930s, from Rodchenko’s photo-stills to El Lissitzky’s photomontages in USSR in Construction, this article will diversify the representative works and photographers in this Soviet canon to include Mikhail Prishvin. Prishvin, an author writing both for children (young subjects under development) and for adults (subjects undergoing a new transformation), provides an unexpected and heretofore missing primer for understanding the defining trajectory of photographic literacy and the forces shaping visual and textual production in the early Soviet period. In two unconventional lessons, moving from the children’s book to elite journals, we will slow down our perceiving eyes and camera lenses in order to read with expert speed a rapidly changing Soviet present. By learning to read photographically, we gain a new lens through which to view the complex trajectory of Socialist Realist imaging, just as Socialist Realism would become the lens through which authors, artists, and readers would experience the shape of their own worlds.
....
It is precisely this process of conflation of text and image within the boundaries of the illustrated book for young Soviet readers that the symposium plans to examine. As a part of the general desire to translate Communism into idioms and images accessible to the illiterate, alternatively literate, and pre-literate, children’s books visualized ideological norms and goals in a way that guaranteed easy legibility and direct appeal, without sacrificing the political identity of the message. Relying on a process of dual-media rendering, illustrated books presented the propagandistic content as a simple narrative or verse, while also casting it in images. A vehicle of ideology, an object of affection, and a product of labor, the illustrated book for the young Soviet reader became an important cultural phenomenon, despite its perceived simplicity and often minimalist techniques. Major Soviet artists and writers contributed to this genre, creating a unique assemblage of sophisticated visual formats for the propaedeutics of state socialism.