The recent Iranian presidential election and the untimely death of popular music icon Michael Jackson make an odd pair, to say the least. Yet, these two events, which dominated media coverage and drew international audiences during the summer of 2009, point to a fundamental shift in the relationship between social knowledge, public spectacle, politics, and photography. The widespread audience for photographic media, no longer just a body of spectators, is now engaged as both the producer and consumer of the photographic public sphere. As a result, official exhibitions, governmental programs, museums, and the press are straining to keep pace with and respond to these changing conditions. Similar efforts to harness photography’s command of the public imagination took place a century ago. Avant-garde artists in the Soviet Union and Germany, for example, put aside their brushes and turned to photography, which they saw as a universal medium that transcended class and ethnic divides. An increase in international exhibitions dedicated to technology and the changing mores of modern life provided fertile ground for experimentation with photography’s propagandistic potential. Taking this period of experimentation as its subject, Public Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda from “Pressa” to “The Family of Man,” 1928–55, chronicles the most innovative and influential efforts in the development of the photographic exhibition as a cultural and political medium.

Public Photographic Spaces is part survey text, part anthology, and part exhibition publication. This unique approach makes it a multi-faceted resource for photographic historians as well as for those engaged in contemporary theoretical debates on visual culture. It succeeds because of the rigorous structure and tight editorial choices of Jorge Ribalta, who served as the curator of the equally ambitious companion exhibition, Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and The Modern Photographic Utopia, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. In both exhibition and book, Ribalta chose a specific site to frame documentary practices: Barcelona in the case of the exhibition and Benjamin Buchloh’s seminal essay “From Faktura to Factography” for the anthology. First published in October in 1984 and reproduced as the book’s prologue, Buchloh’s essay traces the transition in the Russian avant-garde from complete abstraction in traditional media like painting and sculpture to the production of representative, socially engaged art in the technological medium of photography.

This shift is exemplified in the career of Russian artist El Lissitzky, especially in his positivist, revolutionary, and propagandistic design for the Soviet pavilion at the 1928 International Press Exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund (Pressa) in Cologne. Not only did this landmark exhibition influence Lissitzky’s future experiments, it had a far-reaching ripple effect and represented a new relationship between photography, journalism, modern identity, and the masses in Weimar Germany. There Lissitzky’s display strategy, designed to engage the audience in an all-encompassing photographic space, would reach a broad audience through an international exhibition. More significantly, his strategies were adopted and transformed by both Herbert Bayer, designer of several German pavilions, and Edward Steichen, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and organizer of the American pavilion at Pressa. Bayer and Steichen would unite in 1942 at MoMA, applying their firsthand experience of Lissitzky’s installations to create an exhibition design for Road to Victory. The exhibition’s grand narrative, starring the American public united against a cast of foreign players, would become the hallmark of Steichen’s own monumental and influential propagandistic exhibitions during his tenure at MoMA.

Both Buchloh’s essay and Ribalta’s anthology follow this lineage of influence stretching from Lissitzky’s Pressa installation to MoMA. What Public Photographic Spaces adds to this framework is an incredible collection of primary documents, both visual and textual. Public Photographic Spaces is organized into twelve chapters, each focused on a single exhibition design documented with a combination of installation views, reproductions of original catalogue layouts, maps of the exhibition halls, and mock-ups of audience traffic patterns. Selected essays from the original catalogues, treatises on the uses of photographic technology contemporary to the time of the exhibition, press releases, and exhibition reviews are also included. Through the survey of these selected photographic installations, it is possible to not only follow the spread of Lissitzky’s exhibition paradigm through Europe and to the United States but to trace how photography came to hold a prominent position at the nexus of avant-garde art, politics, and public space during the twentieth century.

Following the historical documents for each exhibition, Ribalta includes a scholarly essay, sometimes from the era of the exhibition but often recently written, that considers the impact of the show on artistic and/or social developments. This approach is exemplified by Jeremy Aynsley’s essay, which considers the Pressa exhibition in the larger context of Weimar Germany and the culture of Cologne in particular. Additionally, Aynsley positions El Lissitzky’s Soviet Pavilion within the larger context of Pressa. Given the revolutionary design of, and scholarly fascination with, the Soviet pavilion—indeed even the photographs and other primary material included in the anthology focus exclusively on it—one can easily forget that the exhibition was in Germany and included pavilions from twenty-four nations. Aynsley recuperates the social and international context that made Lissitzky’s pavilion so influential, while succeeding chapters represent its impact.

The strength of this anthology lies in the interplay between the historical documents and analytical scholarly essays. After opening with Pressa, following chapters trace Lissitzky’s continued experimentation with photographic spaces in the Soviet pavilions of the International Film and Photo Exhibition (1929) and the International Hygiene Exhibition (1930), both also held in Weimar Germany. Meanwhile, two essays by Ulrich Pohlmann attest to the effect of Lissitzky’s designs in Germany, Italy, and the United States. Chapters on the German pavilions at the Society of Applied Arts Exhibition (1930) and the Workers Union Exhibition (1931), as well as the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (1932) in Italy, substantiate Pohlmann’s analysis.

In addition to linkages, the survey of these exhibitions reveals moments of rupture in their lineage. Multiple essays point to the political and formal turning point in this chronology of exhibitions as The Camera: Exhibition of Photography, Printing and Reproduction (1933). Along with the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, there was a shift in the formal strategies of exhibitions. Installation shots reveal the transformation from the dynamism, discontinuity, and displacement of photomontage to the unified field of vision of photomurals. Lissitzky’s early designs combined newsprint and enlarged photos at Pressa, mimicked the medium with constructed filmstrip installations at Film und Foto, and covered the ceilings at Hygiene. Photographs exhibited in The Camera in 1933, however, were matted, framed, and hung individually in rows, except in the main hall where they were enlarged to mural size and laid out in a continuous band of marching troops and fields of soldiers circling the top of the wall. Clearly, visual dynamism had been traded for visual order and control. Bayer, who wrote the catalogue essay for The Camera, as well as Steichen, would learn from a combination of both models.

Steichen’s exhibitions, although derided by Buchloh as relatively reactionary celebrations of consumer culture compared to their Soviet counterparts, are placed within their scope of influence by Christopher Phillips. Drawing on his extended study of Steichen’s photographic engagement with the World Wars, Steichen at War: The Navy’s Pacific Air Battles (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), Phillips’s essay on The Road to Victory situates Steichen’s efforts within the institutional development of MoMA’s department of photography—an aspect that set them apart from Lissitzky’s temporary installations at ephemeral international exhibitions. Meanwhile, Eric Sandeen shows that The Family of Man was just as much a part of a strategic nationalistic propaganda campaign in post-World War II America as were Lissitzky’s efforts for revolutionary Russia. Like Phillips’s contribution, Sandeen’s essay is culled from his longer examination of the subject, the recently published Picturing an Exhibition: “The Family of Man” and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010).

While Vanessa Rocco’s essay, “Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in Rome,” is the only new work produced for the anthology, the book begets a flood of fresh ideas and possibilities. Indeed, by pulling together a rich, contextual lineage of historical documents and scholarly discourse for Lissitzky’s Pressa pavilion, this book makes clear how much research on this and the other selected exhibitions remains unfinished. If this is what the Soviet pavilion looked like at Pressa, what might be said of the other countries’ pavilions? What, for example, did the South American Pavilion look like, and how did its presence translate for later generations of photographers in that region, who believed deeply in the revolutionary potential of both photography and public art? The emphasis in Public Photographic Spaces on context reveals holes in what previously seemed well-charted territory.

That Ribalta allows Buchloh’s “From Faktura to Factography” to frame the parameters of this anthology somewhat limits the book. The reader should be aware that Ribalta offers but one interpretation of the history of photographic exhibitions. There are influential contemporary figures absent from the discussion in these pages, most clearly Stieglitz and his early exhibitions at the Little Galleries of the Photo Secession, which set a significant precedent, at least for Steichen and his successors at MoMA. Additionally, while mentioned, there is limited attention given to the popular press, both in Weimar Germany and the United States, which made photography the dominant mode of visual communication through magazines such as the Berliner Zeitung and LIFE.

Public Photographic Spaces nevertheless offers a valuable approach to this period of art history, using extensive primary documents, in particular photographs themselves, to anchor scholarly analysis in the realities of the installations, plans, and didactic material for exhibitions that have otherwise become historical legends. Arguably this book’s most important contribution is its claim that the exhibition itself is an avant-garde medium, and a photographic medium. Through each chapter’s focused survey of an influential photographic installation, Ribalta asserts that the photograph’s role as a document is based on the forum, format, and circulation of its exhibition. This concept is not in and of itself revolutionary; at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s there was an explosion in the theorizing of photography, particularly documentary practice. However, by presenting us with documentary pictures of photographs in context—as wall-sized murals, in exhibition installations, and catalogue layouts, and never as individual images—Ribalta makes his point visually, rather than turning to rhetoric. As a result, in this anthology of influential and compelling scholarly texts, the photographic spaces speak loudest of all.

The photographic chronicle of events during the summer of 2009 is a relevant contemporary analog to the subject matter of Public Photographic Spaces. Even before the Iranian government evicted foreign reporters from the country, the lead image in The New York Times online was not by a photojournalist but was rather a slideshow of pictures by citizens sent in from cell phones, emails, or social networking sites. Accompanying their coverage, The New York Times featured a video disclaimer discussing the difficulty in verifying the captions, identities, or facts of the often anonymously submitted photos. One may argue that this strategy was born of necessity in the case of the Iranian elections, since the government controls the professional press. However, a few weeks later, when the King of Pop passed away, it was once again a digital slide show of images sent in from readers around the globe that claimed center stage on The New York Times site. As the generation that grew up submerged in non-stop imagery, fast-cut videos, and camera phones participated in a rite of communal mourning, they drew attention to the way in which the pervasive nature of photography has changed the perception of documentary truth. No longer represented by a single searing image, the unedited, inexhaustible image stream is the photographic format of this generation, and of their reality.

The survey of historic exhibitions in Public Photographic Spaces reveals the mechanisms through which a photograph’s individual subject is subsumed by the ideology of its installation. This look back at history’s photographic spaces calls us to think critically about out present ones as well. Even in the context of new forms of circulation, photographs are still asked strategically to pit one nation’s interests against that of another. Iranian protesters marched with signs in English, knowing their images would play to an international audience. President Obama requested that the American-based site Twitter delay a service outage to provide the Iranian people with a forum for communication that the anti-government protesters were relying on heavily. In the face of these changes, the strategies, structures, and influences of avant-garde figures of a century ago become all the more relevant. Among its many other achievements, Public Photographic Spaces brings those figures back to life and underlines that relevance.