Stefan Rohdewald

Die Wiedererfindung des Heiligen Russland im Bildband

The Reinvention of ‘Holy Russia’ in illustrated Coffee-table Books:

The Change of Photographic Conceptions of Orthodox Religiosity in the Entanglement between East and West during the ‘Cold War’

The contribution investigates the development of the roles that photographic illustrations played in Western and Soviet illustrated books featuring the Russian Orthodox Church, concentrating on the years after Stalin’s death up to the renaissance of religiosity during the last days of the Soviet Union. If at first photographs were used in Soviet books as a means to document official and ceremonial aspects of the church, in the 1970s they served in Western publications to make the jealously exagerrated ‘deep religiosity’ of Russians accessible to Western readers. In 1980, the Moscow Patriarchate came even closer to such publications in a book that was aimed at the Russian public as well as at the Western readers. Then, in 1982 the Patriarchate asked a Western photographer, who in 1979 had published an impressive book about the Vatican, to produce an outstanding book on the church for the Western public with his Swiss publishing house. After 1988, as shown with a Soviet-Finnish publication of 1990, Russian publishers and photographers themselves used pictures to foster individualized religiosity, too. With the positive? reception of the genre of illustrated coffee-table books among representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, the photographs not only formed a new image of the church, but also gave the readers examples of how to practice renewed religiosity. Thus, in the transnational and "transimperial" communication with the West, photographs in Soviet publications changed from serving primarily documentary functions to become primary expressions of religiosity and political-religious concepts.

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