Aleksandr Rodchenko

Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova revises the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) was a highly versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders. His photographic work between 1928, when Stalin rose to power, and the late 1930s reveals a wide-ranging search for a different pictorial language in the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the Five-Year Plans.

In response to forced modernization, Rodchenko’s photography during this time questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this argument is Rodchenko’s infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebova’s careful reading of Rodchenko’s oeuvre yields a more diverse practice than has been generally acknowledged and brings to light new aspects of his work in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work he undertook with Varvara Stepanova.