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Heroic Comrades, Meet the Common Man
by J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
New York, New York, November 24 - 30, 1999
Propaganda and Dreams:
Photographing the 1930's in the USSR and the US
International Center of Photography
1130 Fifth Avenue [New York]
Through February 13 [2000]
The presiding deities that greet you upon entering the ICP's high-concept
show-"Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the
US"-are Alexander Rodchenko's stalwart, forward-gazing Young Pioneer and
Dorothea Lange's life-battered dust-bowl refugee. Whether Five-Year Plan or
Farm Security Administration, their photographers and some of ours were then
working for the state, and much of "Propaganda and Dreams" is devoted to
analogizing the imagery-matched Soviet and American pictures of rural
kitchens, hydroelectric dams, nursing mothers, construction workers, and
marching bands.
Of course, the Russians had a taste for slashing diagonals. And if Walker
Evans's cotton-shack assemblages presage Pop art, there are some great
Socialist Realist pieces here-like the perfectly staged collective-farm
dinner, shot somewhere in the Ukraine during the man-made famine of 1934.
Compare this outrageous cliché to Arnold Rothstein's carefully placed steer
skull on a piece of parched earth. Indeed, while the Soviet fields are never
empty, the American fields often are.
Moreover, the U.S. photos occasionally need captions to point out, for
example, that the agricultural workers harvesting one pasture of plenty are
exploited Filipinos. And, unlike their jolly Soviet comrades, the American
workers are almost always unsmiling; they're closer to the pensive, solitary
figures of Edward Hopper.
Similar material, complementary politics, contradictory results. The
Americans were exposing poverty; the Russians negating it. The associations
intended by the exhibit's title should really be reversed: It's the U.S.
that made propaganda and the Soviets who photographed their dreams.
Heroic Comrades, Meet the Common Man
by J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
New York, New York, November 24 - 30, 1999
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/9947/hoberman2.php
FOR PERSONAL AND ACADEMIC USE ONLY
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