FROM THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FIRST FIVE YEAR PLAN TO POPULAR CULTURE
Text topic: Philosophy of Media
Text author: Андријана Ристић
Illustrated press in the SFRY 1945 to 1980 marks the political rule of Josip Broz Tito and the Communist Party and represents a conglomerate of visual and narrative contents, with a significant role in establishing and popularizing socialism and the development of popular culture. Visualized news, trends and propaganda represented the experimental field of regime’s occasional indulgence, indicated the shifting of behavioral boundaries and changing of the everyday life philosophy. The same thematic contents of magazines allowed differentiation of several dominant phenomena, which provided the emphasizing of the best visual testimonies of political, social and cultural reality of the socialist period, and the changes the society was undergoing. Photographs from the cover pages were indicators of regime’s agitation and propaganda in the first years after the World War II, which already in the early fifties began to indicate social change, the relative liberality of the Yugoslav regime, in the same time being a response to the audience pressures. The starting hypothesis is that the illustrated press, as a mass medium, was a carrier of information and entertainment, as well as it was an integral part of mass culture, in which the dogmatic influences of the East and the West intertwined throughout the 1945-1980 entire period. Since the end of the fifties, a modernized illustrated press supported the new trends and improvement in everyday life, whereby it participated in the westernization of society. The aim of this exposition is to present the possible cultural and socio-political interpretation of the illustrated press as a mass medium in the service of daily political needs, but also as a carrier of visual representations of changes in the perception of everyday life and popular culture.