![]() Kohonen ably examines each image, elucidating how visual media helped to anchor otherwise abstract political and intellectual concepts of the future and modernization within the Soviet Union. In Picturing the Cosmos, drawing on a comprehensive corpus of rarely seen photographs and other visual phenomena, Iina Kohonen maps the complex relationship between visual propaganda and censorship during the Cold War. ![]() The book is an easy read and visual-historical approach allows for some fascinating insights.Space is the ultimate canvas for the imagination, and in the 1950s and '60s, as part of the space race with the United States, the solar system was the blank page upon which the Soviet Union etched a narrative of exploration and conquest. Picturing the Cosmos provides a useful introduction to understanding the media representations of space exploration in the Soviet Union and is an important staging-post on the route for understanding the highly relevant topic of ' out of sight ' experiences entering the material world and every day life of common citizens. An important visual-historical study of the representation of space in the Soviet Union, and significant in its attempt to decipher political messages of conquering nature with science and technology tools, designed and operated by Soviet citizens. Based on a thorough analysis of illustrated stories published in the popular magazine Ogonek, paintings by cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov and other artists, films as well as archival material, the book examines in detail the various visualization strategies of the kosmicheskaya era., The radical political and even metaphysical ambitions of the Soviet space effort generated contentious debates in Soviet visual culture between the 1950s and 80s, as is documented by Iina Kohonen in close and loving detail., The book examines how visual media served to construct an overarching heroic mythos of the conquering Soviet man, bravely exploring the depths of space, for the glory of the USSR and all mankind, and how that narrative was crafted to emphasize the values that Soviet leaders wanted to instill in their citizenry - while hiding uncomfortable realities and preventing attitudes at odds with the official line., This beautifully illustrated book provides compelling insight into the construction of the cosmonauts as idealised heroes of the Soviet Union.and shows the role that cosmic images played in the making of modernity., One of the first comprehensive studies of the imagery produced on the space exploration and its coverage in Soviet media. It is a good book, offering a different look at Soviet policy in the USSR's Golden Age of space achievement., A fascinating journey into the visual history of the early years of Soviet space travel. Pictures do matter, and the contradictions of Soviet politics and ideology are made clear in Picturing the Cosmos. Across five heavily illustrated chapters, Picturing the Cosmos navigates and critically examines these utopian narratives, highlighting the rhetorical tension between propaganda, censorship, art, and politics.Īn interesting and insightful book about Soviet culture in the early Space Age of the late 1950s and 1960s. Soviet cosmonauts, meanwhile, were depicted as prototypes of the perfect Communist man, representing modernity, good taste, and the aesthetics of the everyday. The USSR mapped and named the cosmos, using new media to stake a claim to this new territory and incorporating it into the daily lives of its citizens. ![]() ![]()
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