The paper examines the photographic work of Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942), the Swiss journalist, writer, historian and antifascist resistance activist, in the context of her photojournalistic expedition to the Soviet Union, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Finland and Sweden in 1937/38. Schwarzenbach worked from 1933 to 1942 as an image reporter for the Zuericher Illustrierte and was considered as an internationally established correspondent. The photographic image report developed actively as genre in the 1930s. Until the present the genre is highly subjected to the danger of ideological appropriation and propagandistic instrumentalisation.
The analyses focuses on discursive, aesthetical and technical mechanisms of Schwarzenbach’s travel photography particularly from Finland and Sweden with regard to its contribution to the visual symbolic deconstruction of Race, Nation, Gender, Class and Religion. The paper scrutinizes Schwarzenbach’s photographic strategy of evading contemporary dominant visual aesthetics of the 1930s and underlines the emergence of new image strategies within the established genre of the photographic travel report.
The study opens a critical postcolonial perspective on photographic reports and shows in how far Schwarzenbach’s photographs escape nationalist claims on supposedly documentary journalistic images.
The image discourses from 1937/38 are analysed alongside the contemporary work of Annie Leibovitz (*1949), US-American (journalistic) photographer working in the genre of portrait who became the first female artist to exhibit at Washington’s National Portrait Gallery in 1991.
As an example of journalistic commercial photography is the Fall-Winter 2015 advertising campaign for the international fashion down feather clothing company Moncler staged in Iceland is discussed. Leibovitz’ critical visual approach to the realm of allusions to Russian folklore and Nordic sagas allow for a non-violent re-interpretation of the Nordic motives. Medially circulated journalistic photography – particularly travel image report and commercial photography – are actively participating in the discursive formation of visual knowledge. Their imaginary potential for overcoming a continuing visual reproduction of epistemic violence is assumed to be one of the central powers for a societal change.

Elisaveta Dvorakk is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her work focuses on Journalistic Travel Photography and Political Aesthetics of the Documentary in Switzerland and the Soviet Union (1937–38). She holds a Masters Degree in Art History in Global Context with Focus on Europe and America from Free University Berlin. E.D. studied Art History, Theory and History of Photography, Gender Studies and Theology in Berlin, Zurich and Vienna. She also received a Diploma in Icon Painting from St. Petersburg/ Bordeaux. Her research interests include Critical Theory of Photography; Gender, Postcolonial and Post-Secular Theory; Activisms; (Post-)Digital Archiving. She is a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation.

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