![]() Instead he found the photographer who had taken a casual picture of him before the historic flight, when Gagarin was still a young, unknown pilot. When Gagarin’s mother asked him for a photo, he did not give her any of his iconic images, instantly recognizable around the world. While the government decreed that a bust of each flown cosmonaut should be erected in his or her home town, Alexei Leonov, the first “spacewalker,” objected to the installation of his monument, which thus had to remain in the sculptor’s studio for 28 years. My interviews with Soviet space program veterans and the study of personal diaries and archival materials suggest that cosmonauts did not easily identify with their own visual iconography. They encapsulate the contradictory essence of Soviet space mythology – an attempt to build a propaganda campaign around a highly secretive program, to prove the superiority of socialism while stressing the peaceful and international character of the space enterprise, and to mobilize mass enthusiasm for space exploration while reaffirming domestic family values. The ambivalence of cosmonaut roles – as heroes or ordinary people, as models of masculinity or family men, as emotional humans or extensions of technology – shines through many images in the book. A slow study of visual images, like slow reading, uncovers what a fast glance often misses – the expressions on the faces of villagers watching a just-landed cosmonaut, or the ordinary details of cosmonauts’ daily lives that undermine conventional stereotypes of masculinity. This book shows that neither documentary photos nor artwork can ever be reduced to a single meaning. Representations of humans and machines are blurred in utopian technological visions. Typical imagery of Soviet space heroes in public and in private evokes a fairytale script. Shades of color and grayness in space paintings display a range of conflicting emotions, from awe to escapism. Photos of heavenly bodies and depictions of space technology convey the message of conquest. In this book, each space picture is truly worth a thousand words – Kohonen’s analysis reveals not only the explicit intentions of the media, but also the underlying assumptions of the Soviet visual discourse. She studies the photographic record of the Soviet space program not for the sake of finding vanished cosmonauts, but to detect the embedded ideological messages – in other words, to compile the grammar of Soviet visual propaganda. Kohonen’s approach is different: she looks at smaller details and bigger context. Such studies addressed the questions of secrecy or immediate political expediency. Previous studies of the visual record of the Soviet space program focused on more obvious issues, such as the retouching of cosmonauts’ group photos to erase perished or expelled candidates, or the elimination of cosmonauts’ photos with Khrushchev after the embattled Soviet leader was ousted in 1964. In her talk, Iina Kohonen used this picture – one of the most ridiculous and at the same time symbolic images of the Space Age – to make a point about a touch of humanity in the idealized representations of cosmonauts by the Soviet propaganda machine. the 2009, Soviet I The saw at leader a offending a huge, conference Nikita blow-up shoelace Khrushchev on photo Soviet belonged of “space an upon untied to Yuri enthusiasm” a triumphal shoelace Gagarin, projected return in walking Basel, to Moscow after his pioneering space flight. International Space Station and is currently scheduled to return to Earth next week.In Switzerland, on to January meet the screen. Rising shuttle, as well as a long smoke plume.Ī shadow of the plume appears on the cloud deck, indicating the direction of the Sun. Hot glowing gasses expelled by the engines are visible near the Taken well above the clouds, the image can be matched with similar images of the same shuttle plume taken The above image was taken from a shuttle training aircraft and is not Images of the rising shuttle and its plume became widely circulated over the web shortly after If you looked out the window of an airplane at just the right place and time last week, you could have seen something very unusual - the space shuttle Endeavour launching to orbit. #Images of the space endeavor professionalEach day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe isįeatured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |