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Dagnoslaw Demski
in cooperation with Anelia Kassabova, Ildikó Sz. Kristóf, Liisi Laineste
and Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
Within and Across the Media Borders
Studies about the Other in Visual Representations in Central and Eastern Europe
The Multi-Mediatized Other volume of the series concerns the influence of visual
media on people’ lives, their ways of perception and of representing the world in
the years 1945-1980. Its chapters present how people used, interacted with, and
coped with the abundance of visual media during this period. The central focus of
the book is the question of whether the increasing number of the types of media
and of their products enabled people to understand and depict the surrounding
world in a new way. We also ask what ways these visual media accompanied every¬
day life and what has been their contribution to the understanding of reality.
This volume isa continuation of a previous three works in the series: Images of the
Other in Ethnic Caricatures (2010), Competing Eyes: Visual Encounters with Alterity
in Central and Eastern Europe (2013), and War Matters: Constructing Images of the
Other (1930s to 1950s) (2015). The last volume focuses on more than three decades
when visual media changed and developed rapidly. During this time, paintings,
drawings, graphics, and caricatures were accompanied by black-and-white and
color photography. They appeared in daily and weekly newspapers and journals.
Soon photography became a means to preserve private events and experiences. The
postwar period was also a time of increasing popularity of cinema—a visual form
that captured movement—and later of television, first black-and-white and later,
color. Our intent was to grasp the specificity of the period in terms of significant
changes in media and the new potential of these media related to recording gestures
and whole sequences of life. With an analysis of this shift from frozen images in
drawings, graphics, and photography to movement recorded on film tape, this vol¬
ume completes the series of books devoted to visual representations of the Other.
The Other was the main topic throughout the series. Initially, according to
the historical period, the Other has been understood in the narrow way of being
excluded from society because of ethnicity, attributed barbarity, different social
status. At first the visual images of otherness were limited to caricatures. The first
volume in the series was a compendium of the main types of central and eastern
European caricatures at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Demski
& Baraniecka-Olszewska 2010: 23). With the passing of time, representations of
the Other took different visual forms, and it was necessary to indicate a multiplicity
and a heterogeneity of “eyes” looking at the Other and both creating representations
and perceiving particular images (Demski & Sz. Kristéf 2013: 13).
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