The Russian photographer Arkadi Shaikhet's image of a young man working a huge machine is exquisitely composed. His face has the calm determination of a Zen archer with his arms forming a kind of bow that seems to bend the wheel of the silvery contraption into an ellipse. Youth, machine, society, progress become one.

Taken in 1936 and now on view at S.K. Josefsberg Studio, Shaikhet's photo has a formal beauty that makes it all the more effective as the advertisement of a new society it was intended to be. The picture is one of more than 50 dating between the early '30s and '70s that sample the history of photography, Soviet-style.

This fine exhibition, titled "Soviet Photography," offers a timely look at a post-revolutionary Soviet Union that's a half-step back in history toward the very pre-revolution "Stroganoff: The Palace and Collections of a Russian Noble Family" exhibit, opening Feb. 19 a the Portland Art Museum. to the museum's five centuries of aristocratic collectibles, dealer Steven Josefsberg offers the irony of another Russian genre that's becoming very hot property now: Soviet propaganda.

But unlike Mao watches and dog-eared, state-published copies of "Das Kapital," these photographs aren't kitsch. In many ways, in fact

Arkadi Shaiket A Komosol Youth at the Wheel -1936 Period Print $3,000 SOLD

, they portray unsettlingly parallel worlds to our own, particularly if you see another exhibit, "Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and U.S.," now on view at the International Center for Photography in New York. If you can't make the trip, check out the equally excellent catalog (Edition Stemmle, 223 pages, $50).

The "Soviet Photography" exhibit is drawn from three dealers specializing in the top photographers of the revolutionary era, such as Yevgeny Khaldei, Boris Ignatovich, Georgi Zelma, Yakov Khalip, Dmitri Baltermants and, of course, the great Alexander Rodchenko.

Photography came late to Russia, at least in any widespread sense. Compared to Kodak-blanketed America—"You push the button, we do the rest"—Russia's medium was for the silvery elite, until the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. Soon after, the newly formed State Commission for People's Enlightenment established a wide education program to teach peasants how to be photo-reporters. And soon after that, Anatoly Lunarcharsky created the photo-in-the-service-of-the-state policy, claiming that the medium was "a profound act of social and psychological creation."

Parallel to this grass-roots effort to make photography part of basic education, Rodchenko was pioneering his own considerably more rigorous view of the medium's artistic potential, articulating the state's political aims through unprecedented compositional power.

Pre-revolution, he studied at the Stroganov Academy of the Arts and was heavily influenced by Italian futurism and cubism. Post-revolution, he took charge of Left Federation of Moscow artists, soon met the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and eventually joined another group run by the painter Vladimir Kandinsky. In short, he brought the most advanced art world developments to bear on photography.

Josefsberg's show brings the wide and high influences on Soviet photography in a sweeping if eclectic, panorama of Soviet social and photographic history. At one end of the spectrum are relatively straightforward documents. On the other are the fractured, contorted-angled compositions that, even though only a few are by Rodchenko, all are so influenced they could be called Rodchenko-mannerists.

In between these compositional extremes, however, are some of the most extraordinary images, such as Boris Ignatovich's 1937 "Blast Furnace," Yakov Khalip's stunning 1936 image of alabaster workers' statues before a communist rally and Shaikhet's "A Komosol Youth."
Other highlights included Rodchenko's unsettlingly penetrating 1924 portraits of Mayakovsky and numerous World War II battle images. Of particular note are a trio of breathtaking images by Khalip, Zelma and Baltermants just as you walk in the door that show how instinctual the formal attitudes of Rodchenko—not to mention that of the early Russian film makers Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein—had become in Soviet photography. Taken in the heat of battle, these images easily earn comparisons with self-consciously arty pictures and film stills.

Yakov Khalip The Watch -1936/37 Modern Print $1800

"Propaganda and Dreams" takes a deeper look at the inherent attitudes embodied by the Soviet photographs by way of comparison to similar vintage American pictures. Lest we forget that just as the Soviet experiment was building to its first crescendo under Stalin, the U.S. was in its own highly central-government-controlled period in response to the crash of '29 and under the sweeping rule of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

What's more, the federal government had its own propaganda arm in the Farm Security Administration. Led by Roy Stryker, who hired the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn and Marion Post Wolcott, these images quite literally created the photographic script for how Americans viewed the Depression, both at the time and now.

In her splendidly researched and written essay for the catalog, curator Leah Bendavid-Val tracks the similarities between '30s-era photography in the U.S. and the Soviet Union, starting with the generalities but then nailing down some fascinating specifics.

She notes that in both countries the photographs were generated by governments for causes the photographers agreed with, communicating a shared belief in the elevating potential of hard work and the positive potential in technology. And then she proves it visually with pairs of images from U.S. and Soviet photographers that could almost be interchangeable of noble farmers, hard-working laborers and heroic shots of new industry and public works projects. But more stupefying is her comparisons of the "scripts" given to both country's photographers by the American and Soviet photo chiefs overseeing them. "Watch for Sunday church," wrote Stryker. "Emphasize the state fair as a farmer's fair," he added, steering his photographer from documentary to myth, because the fairs have "become very smart and have a decided urban tinge."

Similarly while working as a layout artist on the famed propaganda organ "USSR in Construction," Rodchenko gave specific orders for photographers to bring images such as "a close-up of a worker cropping the harvest," recalled photographer Mark Markov-Grinberg.
The words of writer Maxim Gorky of the time have an odd ambiguity: "The goal of our press is to reconstruct the old world anew." Of course, there were also plenty of differences between the two country's systems. In the U.S. you might have had to follow Stryker's party line to be hired (Lange and Evans repeatedly had run-ins, but nonetheless stayed on), but photographers could shoot, show and publish whatever they wanted on their own.

By contrast, Soviet photographers who fell out of favor with officials—more often due to a shift in policy rather than any change in their work—simply disappeared or were "re-educated" in Stalin's torture chambers. Seen in this light the photographers who made the most recent pictures in Josefsberg's show look like survivors and, in some cases, wily ironists.

Consider Baltermants' 1956 "Where Should Mayakovsky Be?" for instance. A trio of giant, darkened plywood cutouts of the famed Russian poet stand in an intersection, ostensibly to help decide the perfect positioning of a statue. Yet, they could also stand as an adroit metaphor for the Soviet artist as political survivor.

But the effectiveness of both the Soviet and American photographs of these two projects also offers a reminder that the much-treasured contemporary notion of politically free, state-funded art is only a model for greatness. With many of these pictures still standing as the seminal photographic statements of their time for both cultures, they point, once again, to the power of limits.

Randy Gragg writes on art and architecture.
He can be reached at 503.221.8575 or randygragg@news.oregonian.com

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