Jan Banning, Red – The Eye of Photography

Red, by Dutch photographer Jan Banning, is a photo project about Communist party premises and their iconography. The series focuses on “democratic” – at least officially non-Communist – countries on several continents (India, Italy, Nepal and Portugal among them), where communism still plays an important role. For Banning – a non-party progressive – Red is a non-propagandistic search for what’s left of the communist ideals, 100 years after the October Revolution. The series shows interiors of party offices and environmental portraits of party officials and activists: people who, unlike their colleagues in communist dictatorships, chose to be member of such a party out of a sense of conviction and free choice against the prevailing neoliberal trend.