Introduction to the special issue - photo-performance, performance photography in real existing socialisms

Photography as a creative tool found successful input in Eastern Europe’s experimental art around the 1970s. It was amongst others conceptual art “which liberated photography and made it possible to accept it as equivalent to other artistic media.” (Krizic Roban 2011). Photography was integrated into artistic creation as well as communication, but was also researched analytically in order to extend the possibilities of conventional art production. In the arts already in the early 1960s photography was turned into a self-reflexive, critical medium that escaped rationalization or institutionalization completely. Directness and physicality were not only true for a radical “Western” photo-scene, but also to certain artists using photography behind the Iron Curtain. “Radical juxtaposition” and/or the “collage principle” were methods lent from happenings or avant-garde theater movements (Nudelman 2014) and applied to the originally visual medium. This special issue focuses on the central questions of why photography became a main mediator of performance art during real existing socialism and how it merged to a notion of photo-performance in post-totalitarian times? Compared to Jones’ case studies the topics the issue will be dealing with weren’t having the social, political, economic and cultural background of late capitalism and therefore were reacting to (or ignoring!) a different ideology and its failures. The background might have been different but the essays will not emphasize a complete isolation between the Blocs. With the proposed special issue, the contributors are posing the still urgent inquiry of what kind of methodology does a scholar of Eastern, Central and South East European performance history require to work on photo-performance and performance photography in times of ideological warfare? And, to put it more provocatively, if a different methodology is needed at all?