Worldwide Photo Clubism: Building a Transnational Community During the Cold War
Friday, October 4 at 9am PST • 12 Noon EST • 5pm BST
Event held via zoom • Registration Link
Photography Network membership is required to attend.
A page from the catalog of the 22nd Singapore International Salon of Photography 1971 (Singapore: The Photographic Society of Singapore, 1971).
Alise Tifentale
Please join us for a Photography Network with Dr. Alise Tifantale talk that examines photography’s community-building potential in a divided world. In July 1963, Taiwan-based photographer Chin-San Long (Lang Jingshan, 1892–1995) opened his solo exhibition in São Paulo, Brazil, organized by the city’s most well-known photo club Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante. In November 1965, the jury of 29th International Salon of Photographic Art in Buenos Aires, Argentina, awarded its main prize to Gunārs Binde (b. 1933) from the Riga Photo Club in Latvia, then one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
Both events had a long-term impact on the photographers’ careers and subsequent local and regional developments. But beyond that, both events hint at the scope of the invisible photo club network—a global system of self-curated, self-financed, and self-edited publications, exhibitions, and competitions that connected photographers across ideological divides and political borders during the Cold War era.
Long before the Internet, photographers had established an independent and inclusive (using today’s terminology) network for non-profit image circulation and cultural exchange. The self-governed photo club network created a transnational community, welcoming participants from what was then labeled as the “first,” “second,” and “third” worlds. At the time, belonging to such a community was particularly empowering for photographers across Latin America, the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, and the rapidly decolonizing regions of Asia.
In dialogue with recent publications such as Cold War Camera (2023) and Collaboration. A Potential History of Photography (2023) and museum presentations such as “Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2021), this talk highlights the legacy of photo club network that changed the landscape and power dynamics in the field of photography on a truly global scale.
Bios:
Alise Tifentale, Ph.D., is an art and photography historian. Her forthcoming book, Photo Club Culture: Global Image Circulation, Competition, and Collaboration in the 1950s and 1960s, examines the interconnected system of photo clubs emerging across the decolonizing world after the end of the Second World War. Tifentale is the author of The Photograph as Art in Latvia, 1960-1969 (2011) and Photographer Alnis Stakle (2009). Her articles have appeared in ARTMargins, CAA.Reviews, MoMA Post, Networking Knowledge, PhotoResearcher, and other journals. She has contributed chapters to Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture (2018), Exploring the Selfie: Historical, Analytical, and Theoretical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), The History of European Photography 1970–2000 (Central European House of Photography, 2016), and Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation, and Design (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She is the curator of the archive and estate of photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (www.artdays.net). She co-curated the Pavilion of Latvia at the 55th Venice Art Biennale (2013) and was the founder and editor-in-chief of photography magazine Foto Kvartals (2005–2010). Tifentale teaches history of art and photography at CUNY Kingsborough and SUNY Old Westbury.