Samuel Proffitt Driver

Samuel Proffitt Driver (USA)

PhD Candidate, Brown University
Program: 
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad
Attendance Period: 
Feb/2023 - May/2023
Research Title: 
Rethinking the Lie: Photography and Truth in the USSR
Research Description: 

The research project “Rethinking the Lie: Photography and Truth in the USSR” is centered around three main foci. The first explores the formation and evolution of photography as a locus of truth under the early Soviet regime and its evolution during the consolidation of Stalin’s regime. Within both Slavic Studies and Art History, there is an almost wholly unchallenged simplification of the discourse, reducing all questions to a truth/lie binary in the case of image manipulation. However, this work attempts unravel this simplification archivally and theoretically by focusing on why manipulation occurred without reducing the answer to a basic moralization of the image. The next two foci, the evolution of photographic images in Nonconformist art and the duplicity of the photo-archive in contemporary Russia, explore the subsequent effects of what I deem to be photography’s preceding role as vehicle of reality building and unstable truth. The last question explores the function of, and problematics inherent in, the photographic archive in post-Soviet Russia as preservation of collective memory, art documentation, state-power, and evidence.

Bio: 
Samuel Proffitt Driver is a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Doctoral Research Abroad Fellow, a Stanford U.S. - Russia Forum Arts & Culture Fellow, a Visiting Scholar at Charles University in Prague, and a Member of the Younger Generation Leaders Network on Euro-Atlantic Security (YGLN). Outside of academia, he has held lecturing and research positions in contemporary art museums both in the United States and Russia, while also working as a Russian-English poetry translator, a translator for Manege Central Exhibition Hall in St. Petersburg, and a dual non-fiction/poetry translator for Russian Oppositional Arts Review (ROAR).