Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko

the photographer's credit and archive stamps and titled, possibly by the photographer's daughter, Varvara Rodchenko, and with reduction notations in pencil on the reverse, framed, Museum of Modern Art Loan labels on the reverse, 1928

Collection of the photographer and his wife Varvara Stepanova

By descent to the photographer's daughter, Varvara Rodchenko

Private Collection, 1960s

Christie's London, 29 October 1992, Sale 4832, Lot 114

New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Aleksandr Rodchenko, June - October 1998; and traveling to:

Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, October 1998 - January 1999

Stockholm, Moderna Museet, March - May 1999

Magdalena Dabrowski, Leah Dickerman, and Peter Galassi, Aleksandr Rodchenko (The Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 259, cat. no. 246 (this print)

Novyi Lef, No. 6, 1928, facing p. 17

Alexander Rodchenko (Pantheon Photo Library, 1987), pl. 30

Alexander Lavrentiev, Alexander Rodchenko: Photography 1924-1954 (New Jersey, 1996), pl. 180, p. 145

This photograph, on neutral very glossy paper, is in essentially excellent condition. This print is possibly ferrotyped and, in raking light, small pits and unevenness of the gelatin surface are visible, typical of ferrotyped prints. This print is trimmed to the image, and there is minute chipping at the periphery. Visible only upon close examination are a few small, soft handling creases, fingerprints, and a tiny deposit of retouching, likely original, in the sitter's head. The reverse of the print is lightly soiled. When examined under ultraviolet light, this print does not appear to fluoresce. There are two Museum of Modern Art Loan labels on the reverse of the frame from the 1998 exhibition, each with loan number '98.798' and 'Rodchenko' in ink.
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The photograph offered here displays the radical perspective that became Rodchenko’s photographic signature in the 1920s.  This bird’s-eye view of a Soviet pioneer was among the first in a series of Rodchenko photographs of young pioneers, all taken from above or below the customary vantage point, and all equally disorienting to those of a more conventional pictorial sensibility.  Dizzying, and to some, heretical, Rodchenko’s new camera angles were especially controversial when portraying pioneers, upstanding members of the leading Soviet youth organization.

The present image was reproduced in 1928 in the avant-garde journal Novyi Lef, Number 6, where Rodchenko waged his defense, in print, of a new and modern aesthetic in photography.  ‘The most interesting viewpoints today are “from above down” and “from below up,” and we should work with them,’ he urged.  ‘I want to affirm these vantage points, expand them, get people used to them’ (quoted in Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era, New York, 1989, p. 246).  ‘For hundreds of years painters kept on doing the same old tree “from the belly button,”’ he wrote.  ‘Then photographers followed them.  When I present a tree taken from below, like an industrial object . . . this creates a revolution in the eyes of the philistine and the old-style connoisseur of landscapes.  In this way I am expanding our conception of the ordinary . . .’ (ibid., p. 247). 

In this same issue of Novyi Lef, Rodchenko pointed out that the new camera aesthetic was not his alone, but could be found everywhere, from the pages of newspapers and magazines to the work of such modern masters as  Lázsló Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch.   Moholy, Rodchenko wrote, is ‘a man whom I value very highly,’ and the influence of the former’s Malerei, Photographie, Film, first published in 1925, had an unquestionably resounding effect on photographers working at the cutting edge of the medium. 

The scarce Pioneer image offered here places Rodchenko at the forefront of European modernism, a cultural revolution that was perhaps most palpable and immediate in the world of photography.  First a painter, then a graphic designer, then a photo-collagist, and ultimately a photographer, Rodchenko came to see the world, as Van Deren Coke observed, through a viewfinder.  It was this ‘seeing as the camera sees’ that would permeate multiple aspects of the visual arts for the remainder of the century.  

The print offered here conforms to the orientation and cropping  of the image as published in Novyi Lef Number 6.  It is the same print that was exhibited in the major Rodchenko retrospective organized by The Museum of Modern Art in 1998.