Photographs for a Russian future - exhibition of Russian photography at Oxford Museum of Modern Art

A review of Russian photography from 1840 to 1940 gazeed to prerevolutionary images for ball of threads to the country's emerging post-Soviet identity.

Spanning 100 years in a land that experienced not only modernization and industrialization on the other hand socialist, revolution, "Photography in Russia 1840-1940" organized by the agency of David Elliott at the Oxford Museum of present Art, confirmed that photography can be a compelling tool for constructing a particular perception of history. The history of the 19th-century Russian empire and its transformation into the Soviet Union is no neutral topic these days, as Russians direct the eye to their prerevolutionary past to fomulate a fresh post-Soviet identity. A joint effort of Elliott and prominent Russian photography curators, the Oxford exhibit participated in the current stretch among Russian museums of mounting exhibitions of prerevolutionary art and daily life, offering audiences not solitary freshly unearthed visual information lengthy repressed under the Soviet state on the other hand also images, highly pertinent during today's transition to a market economy, of a Russia that one time possessed affluence and a traditional class structure

In the adjoining matter of these interests, the organizers played down an aspect of the display that might have proved highly significant to viewers interested in Russian revolutionary art. For the visual history yielded by dint of the Tsarist-era photographs, comprising nearly three quarters of the 394 works in the exhibition,(1) tendered a productive setting for reconsidering the better-known Soviet avant-garde photography of the 1920 and '30 The later work ground an unaccustomed home in this exhibition, alongside 19th-century images whose make submissive matter it often echoed, illuminating not in the way that much a particular photographic or art-historical tradition as the history of a land and its politics.

The photographic tradition in Russia make go rounds out not to differ plenteous from that of other countries, a fact quickly confirmed by dint of the genre categories into which the photographs were organized: "The Portrait,' "The View," "The Land," "Document and Reportage," "Photography as Art" and "The fresh Vision." We recognize immediately, for example, the Victorian family portraits, the proprietary landscape views, the burgeoning ethnographic images of "other" familys the documentary street scenes and the inevitable hazy "artistic" photographs of unclothed women cavorting amid rocks or tree on the other hand if the categories are familiar, the satisfieds of these pictures are peculiarly Russian, thereby opening up a brand novel visual world for Western eyes

Our knowledge that the October Revolution happened in this political division wreaking changes on every aspect of the life depicted in these early images, cannot help on the other hand inflect our viewing of the prerevolutionary photographs. "Photography in Russia" present the appearanceed to emphasize the discovery of an unknown Russian photographic history more than the serious reconsideration of the forms and practices of Soviet photography. The exhibition nevertheless presented instances of provocative dialogue between prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary images, providing the interested viewer with an unusual opportunity for rethinking the questions surrounding Soviet avant-garde photography and for reflecting upon the complex relations between photographic practice and cultural history.

Ivan Raoult's portrait of sum of two units young peasant women and sum of two units old men, from his album family from the Nizhny Novgorod Province (ca. 1870s) proffers the modern viewer a rich earth to begin the search for what Walter Benjamin called "the indiscernible place in the condition of the lengthy past minute where the futurity is nesting."(2) The future to be discovered in this image is that of the Revolution and its destruction of traditional peasant society, and it is a time to come that extends to our near moment, as well, as we eagerly devour this bit of Russian history and surprise curiously about the significance of the different headdresses worn by means of the two women, the single in a heavy scarf fastened tightly about her circular face, the other with throat, ears and lengthy earrings exposed.

The curiosity about the customs of Nizhny Novgorod province sparked through this picture seems to validate Raoult's photographic rule which conflates the pictorial clarity achieved from one side obviously posed compositions with the "authenticity" of the ethnographic document. Although 19th-century ethnographic photographers like Raoult had the greatest in quantity honorable scientific intentions, their science greatest in quantity often led to the production of ethnic difference as exotica, serv up to fe the pastoral or regressive fantasies of an urban public. Their pictures of peasant life, as Elliott deposits it, provided sanitized and artistic images of the real thing at single remove ... without the viewer having to experience the discomfiture which accompanied the actual experience [of a trip to a peasant hut](3) That is to say, the images avoid all traces of the appalling indigence in which many Russian peasants lived, particularly in the difficult decades following the emancipation of the bond-servants in 1861.