ABSTRACT
Images reproduce culture and society and are not just illustrations. They can either build or challenge realities and construct memorie and specific stories. Photographs must be understood as social constructions. This discussion centres on a group of original press photographs featuring the vast inter-war social housing estates in Vienna. The images chosen are those created or used by the American press and which formed the media background documenting three key political events which took place during a time-span of less than ten years: firstly, the construction of these housing estates in the late-1920s as built icons of ‘Red Vienna’; the civil war in 1934 in which they were used as fortresses of Socialist resistance against right-wing populist aggressions; and finally during the Nazi takeover – the Anschluss – of Austria in 1938 where the country was absorbed as part of the Greater German Reich.
These images are not neutral documentation: they offer direct testimony unmasking the subversive media strategies of the right-wing populist government in 1930s Austria. Their distinct technological nature, evident in their physicality and materiality of the actual press photograph with its attached press release, will be examined and discussed as a mediator that shows a word-image relationship in flux.
