Screen - Dark Matter Archives

505 G Karginov,Rodchenko.Thames & Hudson.1979, p 258.6 Colin Osman (ed),Creative CameraInternationalYearbook 1978,Gordon Fraser,p 190.deforming' portrait of a Pioneer. 'for propagating a taste alien toto the proletariat'. and, 'for trying to djven proletarian art to theroad of \Vesrern-style advertising. formalism. and aesthetics'; in1931 the remaining members of the photography section ofOktyabr applied to be accepted into RAPKH (Russian Associationof P[Qierarian Artists). confessing in thejr petition:Oktyabr has abandoned the social struggle to strengthen the position of Productivist art and seeks to replace it by an abstracttheoretics, and leave the artists without support and guidance intheir practical work.1i51 In 1936, Rodchenko himself was dutifully to write, in SovetskoeFoto (its original title now reinstated):I wish to refute utterly the giving of (irst place to formal decisionsand second place to ideological decisions: and at the same time tosearch unceasingly new riches of photographic language - that,with its help, I might create works on a high political and artisticlevel, works in which the language of photography serves SocialistRealism to the full.'The debates were now ended . The theoretical issues they had raisedhowever remain unresolved. Only months after the editors ofNOvy' LeI had warned against the return of, 'the old authoritarian,fetishistic psychology', Stalin's first fu ll-page pottrait had appearedin Pravda. Rodchenko had condemned 'reactionary perspective',To assess the validity of the 'leftist' initiative in photogtaphy inits own terms we must begin by considering the claimed connection.in photography, between psychology and point-of-view.IISpatial metaphots abound in the everyday discourse of politics:'perspective', ·position'. 'line', and so on. For Rodchenko. however.ir is not a metaphor to speak of 'reactionary perspective'. nor dothe leftists' detractors differ from them in this: for example. whatProletarskoe Fow objects to in Langman's image of a combineharvesterdwarfed by a wheat-stalk is an error of 'proportion' inwh ich tbe political is inseparable from the scalar. The complaintagainst Langman may be seen as arising from a reading which hasits roots in tha t convention of Russian icon painting (and ofWestern 'primitive' traditions) according ro which the relative importanceof depicted figures is expressed in terms of their relati vesizes; tbe claims of the leftists however more particularly concernthat which they hold to be unprecedented in visual art: the lookgiven by the camera.In its essential detaHs the representa tional system of photographyis identical with that of classical patntlDg: both depend(the former directly, the latter indirectly) upon the camera obscura .Projecting ligbt teflected from a three-dimensional solid on to aplane surface, the camera obscura produces an image conformingCO geometric laws of the propagation of light - an image seeminglysanctioned by nature itself. indifferent to the subjectivedimensions of human affairs. In recent years, hov'lever, contestationof .the supposed neutrality of the camera has been pursued to thepoin[ 01. that very subjectivity which the apparatus itself constructs.In advance of any other mediation whatsoever. whatever the objectdepicted the manner of its depiction in the camera implies aunique point-of-vie,,,: it is this position, occupied in fact by thecamera, which the photograph bestows upon the individual lookingat the photograph. The perspectival system of representationre presents, before all else. a look.A Rodchenko YoungWoman Pi011etr 1930