The War at Home: Photography, Political Violence, and Spectacle in the Russian Revolution of 1905.

This article examines how photography in early twentieth-century Russia visualized and mediated the political violence of the 1905 Revolution amid a concurrent media revolution and the collapse of censorship. It analyzes the evolving roles of photographic portraits, illustrated press coverage of terrorist bombings, and graphic images of corpses in shaping public memory, political narratives, and spectatorship, highlighting how photographs both revealed and obscured aspects of violence. The study situates Russian photographic practices within global trends of commercial and humanitarian photography, emphasizing the complex interplay of proximity and distance in viewers’ engagement with images of suffering and atrocity. Ultimately, the article argues that this period inaugurated new visual regimes that influenced mass culture, political identity, and the role of photography and film in modern mass politics.