2021 marked 50 years of photography at Princeton, sparking both a reflection on the medium’s history and projection toward its future. As part of the Photo History’s Futures lecture series highlighting exciting voices in the field, the Department of Art and Archaeology and the Princeton University Art Museum welcome Aglaya Glebova to speak about her recent book, Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin, with its emphasis on revolutionary modernity and a well-known artist’s “shadow oeuvre.” Glebova is associate professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. 

Summary

By Kirstin Ohrt

The Department of Art and Archaeology and the Princeton University Art Museum welcomed Aglaya Glebova as part of the Photo History’s Futures lecture series, with A&A graduate student Julia Curl as interlocutor. Associate professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, Glebova spoke about her recent book, Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin. Glebova made the case that while Soviet modernity accelerated time, with no universal days of rest and a slogan that read “2+2=5” to account for the enthusiasm of the worker, Rodchenko used photography to stretch the present and render Soviet temporality as non-linear. Both his subject matter and his composition had the effect of distorting time. He focused on the forgotten corners of Moscow, drawing history into the present, and departed from linear composition in favor of the radical oblique. For Rodchenko, Glebova explained, contemporaneity was vertical, and the linear perspective was a distortion of that contemporaneity. 

Using his balcony as a primary vantage point, Rodchenko recorded everyday life through this time-altering lens. His Assembling for a Demonstration, layers the balconies of his downstairs neighbors between the courtyard and his own balcony, presenting several planes of time, or “several pasts and presents.” As time progressed, said Glebova, Rodchenko found the present ever more unbearable. Despite his efforts to elongate the snapshot that a photograph represents and “recover slowness or stillness for the socialist world,” as Glebova put it, Rodchenko couldn’t detach photography from the present and so ultimately abandoned the medium