Erika Wolf
European University at St. Petersburg, Art History, Faculty Member
- Soviet Visual Culture, Russian & Soviet Art, History of photography, Culture in the Soviet Union, Visual propaganda, Pacific Islands art, and 13 moreArt History, Pacific Island Studies, Modernist Magazines, Photomontage, Literature and photography, History of New Zealand, Walter Benjamin, Modernity, Photography (Visual Studies), Photojournalism, Russian avant-garde art, Performed Photography, and Photographyedit
- Erika Wolf is a visual historian with particular interest in modernism and modernity, Soviet visual culture, propagan... moreErika Wolf is a visual historian with particular interest in modernism and modernity, Soviet visual culture, propaganda, and cross-cultural representation. She is recently joined the faculty in the School of Arts and Cultural Heritage of the European University at Saint Petersburg. She has previously held academic appointments at the School of Advanced Studies at the University of Tyumen (Russia; 2018 to 2023), the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago (New Zealand; 2003 to 2018), the Department of Art and Art History and program in Visual Culture at the University of Rochester (USA, 1999 to 2003) and the Art Department at Wayne State University (1997 to 1999). .She has contributed to exhibition projects at international art museums In 2012, the International Center of Photography granted an Infinity Award to the Reina Sofia publication "The Worker Photography Movement," an anthology to which she made extensive contributions as author, translator, and editor of the English edition. Her most recent book, "Aleksandr Zhitomirsky: Photomontage as a Weapon of World War 2 and the Cold War" was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. She is currently completing two book manuscripts: "Photography and Russia" (for Reaktion Press’s history of photography series Exposures) and "USSR in Construction: A Modernist Propaganda Magazine for the Stalinist Regime."edit
Art Institute of Chicago and Yale University Press, 2016.
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A collection of essays on early New Zealand photographs by scholars from diverse disciplines intended to facilitate research and interdisciplinary undergraduate teaching on the history of photography.
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In 1935, well into the era of Soviet communism, Russian satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov came to the U.S as special correspondents for the Russian newspaper Pravda. They drove cross-country and back on a ten-week trip,... more
In 1935, well into the era of Soviet communism, Russian satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov came to the U.S as special correspondents for the Russian newspaper Pravda. They drove cross-country and back on a ten-week trip, recording images of American life through humerous texts and the lens of a Leica camera. When they returned home, they published their work in Ogonek, the Soviet equivalent of Time magazine, and later in the book Odnoetazhnaia Amerika (Single-Storied America).
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This essay analyzes the Soviet political poster "Under the Leadership of the Great Stalin--Forward to Communism" (1951 by Boris Berezovskii, Mikhail Solovyov, and Ivan Shagin) in terms of its visual assertion of the imperial nature of the... more
This essay analyzes the Soviet political poster "Under the Leadership of the Great Stalin--Forward to Communism" (1951 by Boris Berezovskii, Mikhail Solovyov, and Ivan Shagin) in terms of its visual assertion of the imperial nature of the Soviet Union.
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Text for "Documentary Genealogies: Photography 1848-1917," the catalogue for an exhibition curated by Jorge Ribalta at the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.
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Chapter from Marina Balina and Serguei Oushakine (eds), "The Pedagogy of Images: Depicting Communism for Children," pages 110-148. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021..
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The essay considers the role of photography in the work of the early Soviet writers Sergei Tret’iakov, Il’ia Erenburg, and Il’ia Il’f in terms of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer.” Identifying Tret’iakov as a model for... more
The essay considers the role of photography in the work of the early Soviet writers Sergei Tret’iakov, Il’ia Erenburg, and Il’ia Il’f in terms of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer.” Identifying Tret’iakov as a model for emulation, Benjamin described the revolutionary transformation of the role of the author and the nature of literary work. Calling for the overthrown of “the barrier between writing and image,” Benjamin exhorted writers to take up photography. Committed to creating a distinct Soviet literature, these authors turned to explicitly journalistic forms and incorporated photography into their publications. Using a Leica camera, each created a significant body of photographic work, much of it featuring non-Soviet subjects. The essay examines Tret’iakov’s photographs of a collective farm in the Caucasus and of Hamburg, Erenburg’s photo-book My Paris, and Il’f’s photographs of the United States, relating this photographic literary work to related developments in Soviet literature that accompanied the rise of Socialist Realism during the 1930s.
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This essay considers the use of historical photographs in the work of three contemporary Samoan artists: Yuki Kihara, Angela Tiatia and Sheyne Tuffery. In W. Köpke & B. Schmelz (Eds.), Blick ins Paradies: Historische Fotografien aus... more
This essay considers the use of historical photographs in the work of three contemporary Samoan artists: Yuki Kihara, Angela Tiatia and Sheyne Tuffery.
In W. Köpke & B. Schmelz (Eds.), Blick ins Paradies: Historische Fotografien aus Polynesien: A glimpse into paradise: Historical photographs of Polynesia. (pp. 208-212). Hamburg, Germany: Museum für Völkerkunde.
In W. Köpke & B. Schmelz (Eds.), Blick ins Paradies: Historische Fotografien aus Polynesien: A glimpse into paradise: Historical photographs of Polynesia. (pp. 208-212). Hamburg, Germany: Museum für Völkerkunde.
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In N. Seja (Ed.), PhotoForum at 40: Counterculture, clusters, and debate in New Zealand. Auckland, New Zealand: Rim Books. Pages 206-211.
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In 1928, the young journalist Leonid Volkov-Lannit (1903-1985) contributed a series of polemical articles on photography to the journal Novyi LEF (New Left Front of the Arts), culminating in “Veil on Photo” (Fata na foto). Attacking... more
In 1928, the young journalist Leonid Volkov-Lannit (1903-1985) contributed a series of polemical articles on photography to the journal Novyi LEF (New Left Front of the Arts), culminating in “Veil on Photo” (Fata na foto). Attacking aesthetic approaches to photography, he championed the documentary, reportorial function of photography as a weapon that would facilitate the construction of the new everyday life and outlined a practical program for its realization. Pioner 1930 no 35 page 0-1a
In the early 1930s, Volkov-Lannit implemented aspects of this program in his work as a designer and managing editor of the magazine Pioneer, a weekly literary and cultural publication that was the organ of the All-Union Pioneer Organization, the foremost communist children’s group. The contributions of other writers associated with LEF to Pioneer have been well documented and led later Soviet writers criticize the magazine in this period for being rife with “factographism.” My contribution to the symposium "The Pedagogy of Images" assesses photographic material published in Pioneer during the early 1930s in terms of Volkov-Lannit’s proposed program.
In the early 1930s, Volkov-Lannit implemented aspects of this program in his work as a designer and managing editor of the magazine Pioneer, a weekly literary and cultural publication that was the organ of the All-Union Pioneer Organization, the foremost communist children’s group. The contributions of other writers associated with LEF to Pioneer have been well documented and led later Soviet writers criticize the magazine in this period for being rife with “factographism.” My contribution to the symposium "The Pedagogy of Images" assesses photographic material published in Pioneer during the early 1930s in terms of Volkov-Lannit’s proposed program.
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This was a talk given at the symposium "Trafficking images: histories and theories of photographic transmission" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, on 19 April 2015. A podcast of the talk is available at the below link.
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Exhibition review of artist Yuki Kihara's exhibition entitled 'A Study of a Samoan Savage' (2016) by Erika Wolf published in Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal published in 2017