Oldal 398 [398]
OCR
396 Magdalena Sztandara that the ideas of socialism, such as education for women, solidarity, self-improvement and their active participation in social, cultural and political life, were becoming a reality in the new state. However, the promotion of reading by women actually indicated their (traditional) responsibilities as national citizens: nurturing the nation, preserving moral values of socialism and mothering future generations. When looking at the photographs in Silesian newspapers, one can argue that women’s tasks and duties resemble the slogan ‘God, Family and the Country’ (see Karczyriska 1996) on the one hand, and ‘Six-Year Plan’ on the other: “the conscientious fulfilment of the obligations to the state does not lie solely in paying taxes or realizing the agricultural supplies, but also in making everything that strengthens the power of the state and helps to execute the Six-Year Plan.”’ The popularised historical narrative about the times of social realism is often based on the ideological and symbolic violence visible in literature, movies, chronicles and photographs in the newspapers. The images of ‘a woman from a newspaper’ that we look at are rather idealised pictures that show not ‘how it was’ but actually ‘how it was supposed to be’. Thus, photorealism provides particular narrations that constitute preserved patterns, which in turn allow us to read women’s stories from newspapers in a positivistic and historicist perspective. The media propaganda and the power of imaginaries and representations are nothing new and have already been acknowledged in the humanities. Press photography is a powerful ideological weapon of propaganda due to, inter alia, a “strongly rooted bourgeois conviction” (Sekula 2010: 13), which implies the immanent significance of photography and constitutes its founding myth about its authenticity and truthfulness. The particular, staged, sceneries with photographed women are then transformed as press events, or even, as a “state of affairs” (cf. Flusser 2000). They are not maps, but screens, which instead of ‘displaying’ the world as it is, rather ‘represent’ it. The meaning that comes with the image-as-message is determined by specific context and undergoes a transformation that is dependant on different values and codes, particular conditions and assumptions as well as social convention (cf Freedberg 1989). These aspects constitute the power of photographic images of the women, who thereby are reduced to the “role of visual instruction” (Kociuba 2010: 9). However, another interpretative trace is also possible. The published photographs contain the world, portraying a narrow perspective that belongs to male photographers. Thus, their (male) points of view are highlighted and refer to dominant (male) ideas about cognition of the world (in a symbolical and metaphorical sense as well). The photograph, as cultural text, implies here the context of play, which is staged by the director, a male photographer. ‘He’ was the one who designed the stage and controlled the photographed subject (or object). Thus, the ? The commentary was written by Stanislawa Rutkowska from Raciszöw village (Kalendarz Ziemi Opolskiej 1952: 79).
