Page 13 [13]
OCR
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 everyday 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 volume 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). 11
