Ylli, les couleurs de la dictature
France
2012Projets spéciaux
Ylli (which means “star” in Albanian) is a propaganda magazine published between 1951 and 1991. It was the most widely distributed magazine under Enver Hoxha’s Communist dictatorship and his successor.
Photography was a key element of the magazine, especially colour photography used to render the modernity of the Communist regime and the creation of a new man.
The photographers had to submit to specific impositions about the iconography of Socialist realism. However, in spite of the monotony of this forced optimism, Ylli remains one of the rare visual archives that illustrate and document the transformations of Albania and the propaganda photographers’ work.
Portfolio
About the artist
Anouck Durand works as a photographer on the relationship between images and narration. Her research deals with photographic staging and photo-story creation using photographic archives and family photographs.
In 2010, she received the “Cultures France Hors les Murs” grant to create a photo-novel with photographs of the Communist period in Albania. The photo-novel “ Éthiopiques 1935-1937” entered the public collection of the Nicéphore Niepce museum, in Chalon-sur-Saöne.