Personal or Editorialized

The concept of narrative lies at the heart of tourism publications: travel narratives, stories of the familiar or the exotic, accounts of the joys of travel—not to mention economic and political narratives. 

based on this observation, this research project focuses specifically on landscape images found in both tourist publications and private travel journals dedicated to Czechoslovakia and produced for or by foreign travelers during the Cold War. 

This project seeks first and foremost to identify how various tourism narratives can manifest themselves and be interpreted in landscape photography. Throughout the book, landscape photography plays a central role: it depicts, describes, narrates, or serves to promote the destination. By comparing editorialized images with personal photo albums, the goal is to highlight stylistic and discursive features common to landscape photography, which here both frame and inform travelers’ individual experiences. In particular, the differences in how natural and urban landscapes are depicted—which do not convey the same narratives—will be analyzed. 

Another aspect of this research project examines the circulation of these photographs, understood both from a media perspective (ranging from illustrated photo books to travel photo albums) and a geopolitical perspective (from one space to another). In the context of ideological conflict between socialist and capitalist states, the aim is to explore the hypothesis that landscape photography serves as a vantage point for observing the porosity between “East” and “West.” Is the photographed landscape the site of an ideological clash, or rather one of stylistic and generic common ground? In short, is there such a thing as a socialist landscape?