An Album for Tito. Belonging, Transnational Unity, and Social Critique in a Photo Album by the Yugoslav Worker’s Club Jedinstvo Vienna
This article explores a photo album presented to the Yugoslav state president Tito by Jedinstvo (Unity), a Yugoslav workers’ association from Vienna, in 1972. It documents the club’s activities while also thematically portraying the living conditions of Yugoslav labor migrants in Austria. Using the album as a case study, the analysis investigates how albums, as a communicative and active visual medium, address questions of self-representation and belonging in a transnational context. Following this, the article will analyze how the album marks the confluence of social and political demands, serving also as a vehicle for articulating criticism. In the first section, the article sketches the album’s historical context, and its production and transmission history, as well as its formal and material properties. In the second section, the central topics and motifs, as well as the visual narration brought forth by the composition of the album, will be analyzed. A key focus lays on the album’s process of meaning-making, namely, how its content was selected and compiled. Which strategies of filling and commemorative practices are evidenced in the material’s utilization? Through this approach, an effort is made to explain how content is vocalized through the album’s specific media properties.
Vida Bakondy
Vida Bakondy studied History, Social and Cultural Anthropology, International Development, Gender Studies, and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian at the University of Vienna (MA 2005, PhD 2015). She is currently a research associate in the Balkan Studies Research Unit at the Austrian Academy of Science and a Hertha-Firnberg postdoc fellow. Her research interests are Austrian contemporary history with a transnational focus on former Yugoslavia, migration and exile, visual studies, and history of photographic practices.