Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Devin Fore

"Soviet Factography”
[Response James D. Graham]

Tuesday, February 11, 2025 @5pm ET

N107 (School of Architecture)
 

A study of Soviet factography, an avant-garde movement that employed photography, film, journalism, and mass media technologies. This is the first major English-language study of factography, an avant-garde movement of 1920s modernism. Devin Fore charts this style through the work of its key figures, illuminating factography’s position in the material culture of the early Soviet period and situating it as a precursor to the genre of documentary that arose in the 1930s. Factographers employed photography and film practices in their campaign to inscribe facts and to chronicle modernization as it transformed human experience and society. Fore considers factography in light of the period’s explosion of new media technologies—including radio broadcasting, sound in film, and photo-media innovations—that allowed the press to transform culture on a massive scale.
This theoretically driven study uses material from Moscow archives and little-known sources to highlight factography as distinct from documentary and Socialist Realism and to establish it as one of the major twentieth-century avant-garde forms. Fore covers works of photography, film, literature, and journalism together in his considerations of Soviet culture, the interwar avant-gardes, aesthetics, and the theory of documentary.

Devin Fore is Professor of German at Princeton University. He is editor of Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (Yale University Press, 2017) and History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt (Zone Books, 2014); he is also author of Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (The MIT Press, 2012) and Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

James Graham is a historian, architect, editor and assistant professor in architectural history and theory at the California College of the Arts. His current book project—Psychotechnical Modernism: Design, Pedagogy, and Occupational Therapy, 1914–1945—situates modern architecture within the emerging rehabilitory sciences of the early twentieth century.

M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that Betts Auditorium will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.