Sample: Assignment 1

 

Jewgeni Chaldej: On the Reichstag, 4 May 1945

This image, taken on the roof of the German Reichstag in May 1945, is an important example of photographic place for a number of reasons. It depicts the destruction and chaos following the fall of Berlin. It also tells us much about the wider politics of global space and place at that time. Staged and shot in response to  Joe Rosenthal's famous US image Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, this photos very existance tells us as much about the way in which the world's two emergent superpowers were already starting to wage a global propaganda war before the Second World War was over. It also tells us that both reconised the crutial and central significance of the photographic image in that war.