Devin Fore

Through an interdisciplinary analysis of diverse visual objects and literary texts, this project provides the first sustained analysis of the documentary movement known as “factography,” as it was called in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In linking this impulse to documentary forms that emerged contemporaneously in other countries, the project establishes factography as one of the major avant-gardes of the interwar period. Beyond this historical reconstruction, it also shows how the factographers’ inventive response to the process of modernization revises some of our most basic assumptions about the evolution of our own media culture.