‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’: Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko's Gulag Photoessay

• Published in: Art History
• Main Author: Glebova, Aglaya
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press (OUP) 2019
• Subjects: Visual Arts and Performing Arts; White Sea
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.12437; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8365.12437; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full-xml/10.1111/1467-8365.12437

In 1933, Aleksandr Rodchenko travelled to the White Sea‐Baltic Canal, one of the first Gulags. Shortly after, his photomontages were published in the propaganda journal USSR in Construction . This photoessay largely abandons Rodchenko's earlier modernist practices, and espousal of medium‐specificity, instead downplaying its photographic qualities, and gesturing to other media as visual indemnity. Nonetheless, Rodchenko's Canal images display the constructed and conflicted nature of representation. This essay probes how the radically expanded, albeit incoherent, visual language of the Soviet avant‐garde in the early 1930s could function not only to reinforce, but also potentially to question, the state's dictates.