The Dynamic of the Eye
Rodchenko as Photographer and Periodical Designer
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photographs have become icons in which the young Soviet Union seems to be captured in artistically valid form: pictures showing everyday life made by an engaged observer. But the political and social upheavals that the country went through after the October Revolution are hardly visible in Rodchenko’s photographs. Rather, they appear in passing vis-à-vis the photographic composition as such. Rodchenko and his new visual language increasingly came into conflict with the ideological and propagandistic precepts of proletarian art. His photographic oeuvre is eloquent testimony to the forced extinction of his own experimental aesthetics and the Soviet avantgarde in general.
(Osteuropa 11-12/2015, pp. 141–153)