Visual Culture in Communist Albania: Photography and Photographers at the Time of the Stockmann-Sokoli Expedition (1957)

Gilles Rapper (de) (1)

1 IDEMEC - Institut d'ethnologie méditerranéenne, européenne et comparative

The Stockmann-Sokoli expedition of summer 1957 resulted in the collection of photographs taken before and during the ethnomusicologistsʼ trip in Southern Albania by Wilfried Fiedler, the linguist of the team. This set of several hundred photographs in colour and black-and-white is a valuable testimony of the kind of images of communist Albania that were emerging at that time. In this chapter, I take as a pretext the photographic collection of Wilfried Fiedler, in its content and in its conditions of production, to analyse the situation of Albanian photography in 1957. For this, I begin by presenting the collection and its context, i.e. Albania and its relations with the Communist world before 1961. I then turn to the situation of contemporary Albanian photography to highlight the specificities of Wilfried Fiedler’s photographs and dwell on a determining criterion: colour. I conclude with considerations on photography and modernity.

Mots clés: Albania; Communism; Photography

Domaines: Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Gilles Rapper (de). Visual Culture in Communist Albania: Photography and Photographers at the Time of the Stockmann-Sokoli Expedition (1957). Eckehard Pistrick. Deutsch-Albanische Wissenschaftsbeziehungen hinter dem Eisernen Vorhang, 39, Harrassowitz Verlag, pp.113-128, 2016, Albanische Forschungen. ⟨halshs-01368548⟩