‘The Power of Pictures’ Review: Photography That Sees Genius Under Oppression :William Meyers

Posted By on October 1st, 2015

 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-power-of-pictures-review-photography-that-sees-genius-under-oppression-1443651061

Mr. Meyers writes on photography for the Journal. His photo book “Outer Boroughs: New York Beyond Manhattan” was published earlier this year by Damiani.

An exhibition about Soviet photography and film showcases astounding artistic accomplishments that served a vile end.

‘The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film” at the Jewish Museum has several rooms of stunning photography from the 1920s and ’30s, and if you do not know the history of Russia in the 20th century, you will leave the exhibition at the Jewish Museum buoyed. If you do know the history of the “Evil Empire” you can only weep that such artistic accomplishment served such a vile end.

Nowhere is this dichotomy more intense than in Soviets, the room devoted to portraiture. Georgy Zelma’s “Three Generations in Yakutsk” (1929), Max Penson’s “Untitled (Turkmen in Telpeks)” (late 1930s) and Georgy Petrusov’s “Asiatic Sailor” (c. 1935-36) are arresting pictures of ethnic minorities—and also agitprop disseminated to remind Russians of the peoples they dominated and to show the captives’ gratitude. “The Poet Anna Akhmatova” (1924) was taken by Moisei Nappelbaum, the dean of Russian portraitists. She is shown in profile like a patrician in a Renaissance painting, with her aquiline nose and her soulful expression offset by her stylish headgear and her left hand clutching at her beads. It is a fabulous image and, like most of the works in the exhibition, a wonderful print, but who can look at it without thinking of Akhmatova, the greatest Russian lyric poet since Pushkin, decades later standing with other women outside a St. Petersburg prison in the snow and cold, hoping for glimpses of their loved ones? Akhmatova’s son, a hero of World War II, was arrested because Stalin feared heroes were most likely to challenge him. Her first husband had been executed in 1921.

In Nappelbaum’s picture of him, “Felix Dzerzhinsky” (early 1920s) is faced to the left but his eyes are square on the camera, as if “Iron Felix,” the founder of the Soviet secret police, has the photographer under surveillance. “Boris Pasternak” (1926) is seen in a moody Nappelbaum picture; in 1949 his mistress Olga Ivinskaya would be arrested and sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag when she resisted interrogation meant to make her denounce him. Nappelbaum also took “The Writer Maxim Gorky” (c. 1930); Stalin is believed to have arranged the proletarian playwright’s 1936 death. Alexander Rodchenko, one of the few non-Jewish photographers in this show, has five works in the portraiture section that include two from 1924 of Vladimir Mayakovsky, his close friend and collaborator; the antic poet and playwright committed suicide in despair in 1930.

Georgy Zelma’s ‘Three Generations in Yakutsk’ (1929). ENLARGE
Georgy Zelma’s ‘Three Generations in Yakutsk’ (1929). Photo: Image provided by Rosphoto, State Russian Centre for Museums and Exhibitions of Photography, St. Petersburg.

Rodchenko, the most innovative of the Russian photographers and the one whose work is still most influential, has nine works in the New Perspectives section, four in Constructing Socialism, six in Metropolis, three in Staging Happiness, and seven in Physical Culture, as well as many magazines and book covers he designed in vitrines throughout the show. Rodchenko experimented with radical points of view, sometimes shooting from the ground straight up, as in “Pioneer Playing a Trumpet” (1930), and sometime from overhead straight down, as in “To the Demonstration” (1932). These perspectives marvelously reorient what would otherwise be commonplace subject matter, but they are also perspectives used by the secret police to spy on people.

Another Rodchenko stylistic device is to set a figure against a pattern, like the backlit woman carrying a child against the “Stairs” (1929-30), or the “Girl With a Leica (Portrait of Evgeniya Lemberg)” (1933) where the subject is in the shadow of a crosshatched grill. And he perfected the ability to shoot massed figures, as in his overhead picture “Orchestra in the Streets” (1931) and the line of uniformed female athletes in “Sports Parade on Red Square” (1936). The presentation of large numbers of uniformed human beings performing in synchrony as if they were parts of a machine was a seamless merging of aesthetics and ideology.

Moisei Nappelbaum’s ‘The Poet Anna Akhmatova’ (1924). ENLARGE
Moisei Nappelbaum’s ‘The Poet Anna Akhmatova’ (1924). Photo: Collection of Alex Lachmann

In 1933 Rodchenko was commissioned to photograph the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal, a massive engineering project carried out by forced labor; as many as 25,000 of the 125,000 workers are thought to have died. If he knew the condition of the prisoners when he took “Ship in a Lock” (1933) and the 3,000 other pictures in the series, it is not reflected in his work. In spite of his service to the state, in 1951 he was accused of departing from socialist realism and expelled from the Moscow Union of Soviet Artists, thus limiting his ability to get assignments. He was reinstated in 1955, two years after Stalin died, but passed away himself the next year.

There is work by several other artists of enduring interest in this exhibition; El Lissitzky, Arkady Shaikhet and Petrusov, to name three. There is a section of movie posters and a series of screenings. “The Power of Pictures” demonstrates that Lenin’s confidence in the propaganda value of photography was not misplaced. See it for the genius, but keep Akhmatova’s verse in mind, “It was a time when only the dead / smiled, happy in their peace.”

 

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