Aglaya Glebova, "Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin," 5 October

Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art, politics, and technology during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956), a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his photographic work between the late 1920s and the end of the 1930s exhibits an expansive search for a different pictorial language.

In the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the first Five-Year Plans, Rodchenko’s photography questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this book is Rodchenko’s infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebova’s careful reading of Rodchenko’s photography reveals a surprisingly heterodox practice and brings to light experiments in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work he undertook with Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s partner in art and life.

Aglaya Glebova is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Slavic Languages & Literatures Department. Glebova researches modern art, with a focus on interwar avant-gardes, Soviet art, and the history and theory of photography. Her first book, Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin, received the 2020 Graham Foundation Publication Grant and came out with Yale University Press in January 2023. Glebova is now at work on a project that examines ideas of energy and exhaustion in the art and architecture of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. An article drawn from this project, on the so-called disurbanist architectural movement, is forthcoming in Modernism/Modernity Print+.