Photography theory in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s developed in and as response to photography’s lack of categorization as an official art form within Soviet cultural institutions. Unlike capitalist countries, where the market dictated (and continues to dictate) what constitutes “Art,” in the Soviet context the lack of said market meant that visual artists were almost exclusively employed or commissioned by government and state institutions for various projects. This was not at odds within the said system, it was the norm. Photography, however, occupied a very precarious place in which the medium was confined to photojournalism, photography clubs, and personal images for photo albums. While promoted as a hobby, photography clubs and amateurs were often left to their own devices, their images censored by club members or themselves.
Ota Rikhter, Molodezh’ (Youth), 1959
What is unique, however, is that photographers, those who were most able and willing to easily assist the needs of the state – especially in terms of displaying the reality of Soviet life, falsified or otherwise, were not considered artists after the mid-1930s. Though the timeline is debated by art historians, I myself would deign to say that publicly, art photography in the Soviet Union was no longer a viable category after 1935-1936. This is not to say that art photography did not exist, only that the state failed to recognize it as such in the same way it did paintings, architecture, poetry, film etc. Though many prominent photographers and photojournalists participated in international “art photography exhibitions,” at home in the Soviet Union and abroad, their status as artists was precarious and unrecognized.
I use the term “art photography exhibitions” in quotes because for Soviet photographers, this categorization not only represented a non-sequitur, in that there were no official outlets that recognized their work as “Art” with a capital “A,” but also that many of their images were sent to photography exhibitions abroad and thus the categorization of “art photography” was applied by the photographers themselves and the awarding institutions outside the Soviet Union.
In the Soviet Union, publications and articles about photography theory carefully noted that photography was distinctive, stating that while it contained many of the creative and aesthetic qualities of Socialist Realist artistic media, it was confined to its own category.[1] By the early 1950s and certainly by the 1960s, it was almost universally recognized that photography possessed features beyond that of a simple mechanical process, but nevertheless, vaguely and necessarily connected to reality and art based on the dictates of Socialist Realism.
What did Socialist Realism in photography look like? As discussed previously, in many cases photographers embraced the modernist styles, or rather, adaptations of modernist styles, from the 1920s and early 1930s. Aesthetically, critic Leonid Volkov-Lannit wrote that “Soviet photography does not ignore sharp angles…However, we do not pursue photographic properties as an end in themselves, which inevitably leads to distortion.”[2] Volkov-Lannit reveals that the sharp angles, abstraction, and experimentation with perspective, points of view and lighting pursued by what he terms the avant-garde were not at odds with modern Soviet photography.[3] It was not necessarily the aesthetics of an image that determined if a photograph was Socialist Realist, but the method itself. Socialist Realism, for photographers, from its emergence in the 1930s through (arguably) the end of the Soviet Period, was not as embedded in the aesthetic aspects of images but rather was a state of mind and practice, rather than any particular visual style. For Volkov-Lannit and other critics, pursuing photography for photography’s sake, without taking into account the necessary ideological and political implications, was the antithesis of Socialist Realism, and thus, a failed image. While certain themes and subjects were taboo (nudity in particular), specific and detailed stylistic and creative strictures were largely absent from discussions of Socialist Realism in photography. Instead, these aspects of photographs were discussed on a case by case basis, referring to specific examples rather than photographic media as a whole.
While Socialist Realism was the only acceptable style appropriate in Soviet art, in photography the focus on motivation, rather than purely aesthetic concerns, opened up a range of creative possibilities for photographers, both amateurs and professionals, whose photographs were then evaluated on an individual, work-specific basis.
Next week I will return to the work of photojournalist Dmitrii Bal’termants.
[1]In 1968 Sovetskoe foto published a year-long series of articles debating the role of art and photography, though the author, M. Kagin, failed to reach a definitive conclusion in that time. He instead pointed to the “artistic” and “creative” features of photography, which made it unique amongst artistic media. M. Kagin, “Soderzhanie i forma v proizvedeniiakh fotoiskusstva,” Sovetskoe foto, no. 5 (1968): 27.
[2]Leonid Volkov-Lannit, O kompozitsii reportazhnogo fotoportreta, (Moskva; Izdatelstvo Tsentral’nyi dom zhurnalista, 1962), 19.
[3]Rather, the pursuit of photography for aesthetics alone, i.e. digression into formalism (of which the Western and avant-garde photographers were guilty), was what made these images unacceptable.
Sovetskoe Foto Blog 