“Boring Photography”: American New Topographics, Socialist Boredom, and Post-Soviet Deadpan Photography
Journal: European Journal of American Studies
Year: 2022

This article looks at the exhibition New Landscape (2018), which was the first full-scale attempt to reflect on the popularity of “deadpan” photography in Russia in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The show was partly modeled on the American exhibition New Topographics (1975). I look at the reasons why the American model was adopted and the earlier late Soviet and Russian photographic projects that dealt with boredom, including the most non-conformist ones, were avoided. I conc