Aleksandr Rodchenko

Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenkos photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalins Soviet Union Glebovas book is a valuable addition to the literature on this remarkable and always relevant figure.Peter Lowe, Russian Art + Culture Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (18911956), a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivisms founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his photographic work between the late 1920s and the end of the 1930s exhibits an expansive search for a different pictorial language. In the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the first Five-Year Plans, Rodchenkos photography questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this book is Rodchenkos infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White SeaBaltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebovas careful reading of Rodchenkos photography reveals a surprisingly heterodox practice and brings to light experiments in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work he undertook with Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenkos partner in art and life.