The Socialist Transformation of Albania in the 1950s as Reflected in the Slide Photography of Viennese Journalist Kurt Seliger
This study examines the previously unexplored slide collection of Jewish Viennese journalist, photographer, and travel reporter Kurt Seliger (1921–1999), documenting his journeys to Albania in 1956 and 1957. At the time, colour slide photography was still a relatively new medium, distinguished both by its technical capacity to produce exceptionally sharp, vividly coloured images and by its social function in the collective practice of slide shows. These qualities contributed to its growing popularity in travel photography and in contexts of public presentation.

Seliger’s collection provides, for the first time, a basis for historical and cultural analysis of the functions, visual patterns, and meanings of colour slide photography in post-1945 Austria, with particular attention to socialist Albania as both subject and projection surface for Western modes of perception. The slides are examined in relation to other photographic materials from Seliger’s travels in 1956 and 1957, including black-and-white prints, negatives, and colour negatives. The analysis offers new insights into the visual culture of communist Albania, the role of photography in shaping socialist narratives of progress and ‘exotic’ foreignness, and the largely overlooked history of colour slide photography in the Austrian context.