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512 Elo-Hanna Seljamaa and song celebrations. The very last pages display photographs of industry, modern agriculture and industrial fishery (Figs 11 and 12). This sequence of images tells a story of progress from nature to culture, agriculture and manual labour to industry. Yet while the text, too, is structured chronologically, proceeding from the first song festival to the most recent one, the photographs are not: images of leading Soviet Estonian conductors are placed side by side with photos of organizers of the very first song celebrations and singers of the bygone days are juxtaposed with contemporary choirs (Fig. 13). This creates a sense of permanence and self-sufficiency of the festival tradition. Land of Song, the other book by Mesikapp analysed here, begins and ends with images characteristic of Estonian nature and climate. Nested inside these nature photographs are smaller black-and-white photos of the very first song festivals and of modern celebrations and folk musicians. Images of singers and dancers, on the other hand, are juxtaposed with small coloured photos of birds, berries, butterflies, and flowers native to Estonia (Fig. 14). No reference is made to new buildings, machines, and other markers of socialist advancement. Rather, the juxtapositions of nature and culture bring to mind the Herderian view of national groups as units of a natural kind. Seen as living organisms, national groups are inseparable from particular natural environments, which over the course of many centuries have given rise to unique national cultures. These ties between local nature, people, and culture are understood to be direct and unshakeable, bound to outlive any political, human-made systems." Yet both books also abide by the rules of official iconography, demonstrating the friendship of peoples and the central role of the communist party: included are photos of performers from other parts of the Soviet Union, of army choirs and Soviet officials. “Century of Song’, in particular, includes collages demonstrating the diversity of Soviet-era song festivals and modernisation: men and women, old and young, black and white, Europeans and Central Asians, peasants and urban dwellers, people in folk costumes and smarts suits are all shown to be participating together and, for example, listening to the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov, an honorary guest of the 1969 jubilee song festival (Figs 15 and 16). Both books represent song and dance festivals as a distinctively Estonian phenomenon by means of grounding this tradition in local nature and emphasizing its continuity. However, there also is no confrontation with Soviet ideology. Subtle, ambiguous interpretations enabled by this representational strategy become more easily discernible when it is juxtaposed with coffee-table books where the Estonian and Soviet are visually coalesced. "Cf. an excerpt from the text accompaniying the images: “The songs born on the edge of the land fly out to the sea; the wide expanse of the sea will melt them into its roar or its silence; the fields, the forest and the meadow, too, will take back the songs they gave. Yet something will remain with the people: beauty” (Mesikäpp 1985, unpaginated, emphasis added).
