Russian photographs

Press, 23 November 1988, Page 28

Russian photographs

review

Alexander Rodchenko is best known as a major figure of the Russian avant-garde during the early part of this century for his development of the formal design concerns of constructivism. Art was

seen as a product of a revolutionary social context, a functionary of the new society. Rodchenko was one of a group of artists, poets and musicians known as Left Front of the Arts. His art works were based upon the structural qualities of line, surface, point and colour; art works that both reflected the social revolutionary context and created their own revolutionary artistic context. New forms of expression meant embracing technology, for Rodchenko this led to photography. “Rodchenko as Photographer” is a collection of photomontages and photographs dating from 1921 to 1940 compiled by the Museum of Modern . Art, Oxford. In the prints Rodchenko explores the possibilities of the new medium — numerous planes of vision are intergrated, form, light and perspective are played in contrasts, movement and non-referential moments

are captured while distorted, foreshortened angles are created through experimental viewpoints. The portraits illustrate a compatibility of experimentation in formal qualities with retention of ideological and personal expression. In two prints the poet, Mayakovsky, glares at the camera in such a way as to both assault and concurrently validate its use.

Later portraits start the exploration of tilted and high viewpoints evident in the architectural images. A dramatic angle looking up or down the side of buildings is used to make strange views of familiar structures.

In “House on Myasnitskaya - Street, 1925” a wall and fire escape recede into the pictorial plane while in an illusionistic sense they climb into the sky. Accentuated by a climbing

figure this ambiguity of reference leads to the “new image” necessary to reflect the “new society.” Formal qualities are further explored in compositions based on the trappings of technology (power pylons create lat-

tice patterns) while again retaining an ideological expression. The still life is no longer a bowl of fruit but the photographer’s camera and pen. Even in the “factography” works of the Stalin era formal concerns are not totally banished. “The Dive, 1935,” while depicting athletic power and beauty, eliminates the diver’s pictorial reference of pool/ground and board. The diver exists not in relation to these physical references but only in relation to the frame. From an art historical perspective “Rodchenko as Photographer” allows for the tracing of ideas and methods of both the individual artist and the medium. But the exhibition is more than an art historical collection. Sixty years on in the development of photography many of these prints still stand alone as manisfestations of Rodchenko’s skill and innovation.