|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Black Beauty: Soviet Photographers Today
| Article
# : |
19586 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
1,328 Words |
| Author
: |
Cathy Young
Cathy Young is author of Growing Up in Russia. |
Until recently, the words Soviet photography evoked the cheerful images that used to dominate the front pages of Soviet dailies: smiling muscular workers, collective farmers posing with their beloved tractors, proud mothers with happy children. Arguably, some Soviet photography from the 1920s on had high artistic quality; but the aesthetic experience was always subordinate to the purpose of glorifying life under socialism.
The very title of the exhibit that opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., last May--Changing Reality: Recent Soviet Photography--tells us to expect something very different. And different this photography certainly is, in two ways. It is important to remember that by the traditional standards of socialist realism, a photograph (like a painting or a book) did not necessarily have to show the seamy side of Soviet life to be subversive. Refusing to celebrate its wonders, withdrawing instead into purely aesthetic, ideology-free image was enough of an offense, as the outstanding--though politically conformist--photographer Alexander Rodchenko found out in the 1930s.
In many of the photographs featured in the Corcoran exhibit, there is a strong, piercing note of glasnost-era social criticism. Igor Gavrilov's grim subject matter includes drug addicts, in a psychiatric hospital and in a morgue. Gennady Bodrov's Meat? shows the inside of a store in the provincial city of Kursk: An old woman in the classic outfit of the Soviet babushka (heavy black coat, woolen shawl, felt boots) is picking despondently through a huge pile of nearly bare rib bones. Vasili Shaposhnikov gives us a sickening, heartbreaking image of women alcoholics in a detoxification center: A not-so-young woman, draped in a blanket that slips off to reveal a sagging breast, seems to be doing a dance for two fellow drunks who watch with amusement. Vladimir Sokolayev's Lunch Break at the Metallurgical Plant tells us more than a thousand words ever could about the conditions of the Soviet working class. The stark vision of Yuri Rybchinski takes us into a penal colony for juvenile offenders. In one photo, a guard restrains two German shepherds lunging toward the camera; in the other, two young convicts sit glumly behind the bars of a cell, with the huge shadow of a guard looming on the wall behind them.
The series, by the way, has an interesting history: It was shot before glasnost. Rybchinski, then a Moscow journalist and a free-lance photographer, was commissioned by Soviet Life, a propaganda magazine for Western consumption, to take pictures of a juvenile penal colony in 1978, on the occasion of a visit from a top U.S.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
