Photoavant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s. Alexander Rodchenko and his contemporaries

Avant-Garde Photography 1920s-1930s. Alexander Rodchenko and His Contemporaries

The main slogan of the October Revolution of 1917 – building a new world and transforming reality – was heard and supported by the young Russian intelligentsia, writers, artists, directors, composers and, of course, photographers. The new state needed to quickly reassign the majority of the country’s population to the ranks of supporters. This gigantic social experiment provoked a wave of artistic experiments. At the forefront of the movement was Alexander Rodchenko, a painter, designer and photographer actively working in theatre, cinema and advertising.

For Rodchenko photography was an art with its own pictorial language (as seen from the title of his text for the magazine Soviet Photo, written in 1934 but only published in 1971). At the time this was a statement that Rodchenko had to demonstrate both by his creativity, and his theoretical works. Rodchenko urged his colleagues to seek diversity and capture the world in a multitude of possibilities and points of view. 

The formal photographic techniques he discovered – dynamic diagonal composition, shooting from unexpected angles, forced perspective and the bold use of extreme close-ups – were adopted not only by his students and followers from the photography section of the October group (Eleazar Langman, Boris Kudoyarov, Dmitry Debabov, Boris Ignatovich, David Shulkin, Vitaly Zhemchuzhny and Anatoly Skurikhin), but also by ideological and aesthetic opponents from the Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers (ROPF), as well as photographers who were not included in a group or association (Georgy Petrusov, Mikhail Prekhner, Yakov Khalip, Max Penson, Emmanuil Yevzerikhin, etc.).

“The most interesting points of modernity are ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’, and we need to work on them... I want to affirm them, expand them, and get us accustomed to them,” Rodchenko wrote in the magazine Novy LEF. 

In October 1928 the authors of the magazine Novy LEF joined the October All-Russian Association of Workers in New Types of Artistic Labour: architects the Vesnin brothers, film director Sergei Eisenstein and artists Alexander Deineka, Gustav Klutsis and Solomon Telingater. In 1929 a photo section was created, led by Alexander Rodchenko. A romantic view of the changes taking place in the country filled the work of avant-garde photographers with a new vitality. 

In 1931 an exhibition by members of the October group was held at the House of Printing, with photographs by Alexander Rodchenko, Eleazar Langman, Boris Ignatovich, David Shulkin, Olga Ignatovich, and others. The exhibition was harshly criticised. Here is just one disparaging passage: “Their works [Rodchenko, Ignatovich, Langman] quite clearly demonstrated the impasse towards which the formalist and mechanistic approach to our reality leads, the use of objects of socialist construction mainly for the purposes of formalist trickery” (Proletarian Photo magazine, 1932, No. 1). 

Rodchenko was expelled from the group and it was now headed by Boris Ignatovich. But the subsequent history of the October photo group turned out to be very brief: like other creative associations it existed only until April 1932, when the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU (b) issued a resolution ‘On the restructuring of literary and artistic organisations’. 

Further changes in the socio-political life of the country led to implementation of the socialist realism method in Soviet art, and for many years avant-garde imagery, the liveliest and most vivid phenomenon in Soviet photography, was left forgotten.