Communist Propaganda and Ideologized Visual Representations in Romania
Communist Propaganda and Ideologized Visual Representations in Romania

Summary/Abstract: Ideology and propaganda were an organic part of the communist regime in Romania; consequently, Romanian press photography accurately reflects the elements of propaganda, widespread in the press of the time. The current research is based on the 35,000 photographs originally belonging to the photo archives of two communist local newspapers – Făclia (The Flame) and Igazság (Truth). This visual corpus accurately reports about the communist era, constructing visual narratives about a changing world, both in terms of the urban, and rural landscapes and social values. The paper proposes a brief history of the Minerva Press Photo Archive, an overview of how propaganda worked in communist Romania, as well as a mixed methods analysis of the content of this archive: a quantitative analysis of the tag words assigned to the photos from the digital archive, and a qualitative analysis of them as ideologized visual memories. The second explains the technical production context of the photographs, by linking it to the historical context of the message production and by applying the compositional, iconographic and iconological analysis.

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