Emily Hill
posted 14 February 2008

Anyone frowning that the only thing Roman Abramovich has contributed to his new home town is the dubious footballing performances of Andriy Shevchenko may want to rush over to the Hayward Gallery to admire the Abramovich-funded exhibition of the work of Soviet genius, Alexander Rodchenko. All of a sudden, focus is simultaneously retrained on Rodchenko's iconic images - like those of the young Russian Pioneers - and freshly focused on the man behind the camera, who lay at the feet of the young Soviet enthusiasts, in order to get his uniquely deployed angle.

Born in 1891 to a former peasant father who worked as a prop-man in a theatre, Rodchenko was educated at the Kazan Art School. In 1914, he fell in with the avant-garde poet and revolutionary, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was on tour, with his fellow Futurists, of provincial Russia. Around this period he also met his future wife, artistic muse and 'driving force', Varvara Stepanova. He was to become one of the great figures of early 20th-century avant-garde art, and one of its most versatile practitioners.

But Rodchenko is not, perhaps, a name as familiar to the photographic roll call as Man Ray or Eugene Atget. This may stem from his awkward relationship with the Soviet regime – simultaneously embraced and denounced by it, exhibited and suppressed by it. Rodchenko has come in for heavy criticism in the West for glorifying the Soviet regime, as – in the early days – one of its chief propagandists and artistic agitators, putting a brilliant, dynamic sheen on the emerging socialist dawn. And then, when the revolution turned wretched, and his work was denounced, for seeking limited accommodation with Stalinism, by continuing to photograph the few subjects which he was allowed to develop. Rodchenko's troubled relationship with the Russian critical landscape has its echoes today, as he is both celebrated - and reviled for such projects as his reportage on the construction of the White-Sea Baltic-Canal, a 'miracle' of Communist energy – 141 miles to be built in 500 days – but built by the human misery of those sentenced to 'correctional labour'.

Rodchenko first rejected fine art for the new medium of photomontage, and then moved from photomontage to photography, recognising in the camera the medium of the future – but the third phase of Rodchenko's career was not self-directed. In the 1930s, he was no longer permitted to photograph openly on the Moscow streets without a permit, which meant that his subjects were narrowed to military parades and official sporting events. But even when sticking to officially-endorsed subjects, Rodchenko's creative spirit was deemed a threat to the bureaucratic system – and it was his greatest work that led to his creative strangulation in his homeland, as his photographs of the Pioneers led to his public denunciation as a 'formalist' and Western 'plagiarist'. Magazines refused to publish his work, official objections were lodged when his work was exhibited and he was expelled by the October Group – which he had helped to found.

As is explained in the exhibition wall texts, the photo series was seen as a terrible distortion: ‘“We are surprised that comrade Rodchenko wanted to so disfigure the young, healthy face of the Pioneer”, wrote a representative of a photography club at a collective farm. “As a result of this ‘experiment’, the face of a normal person has been transformed into the face of a freak, and for what?”’ The photographer Semyon Fridlyand added, ‘How could anyone recognise the happy, joyful, open face of the younger generation of communists in this coarse, bestial knot of muscles and hatchet-like visage.’

Rodchenko explained later that he went to the White Sea Canal because 'in [the journal] Soviet photo it had become fashionable to hound me in every issue… it became creatively unbearable for me to work in Moscow… I could have abandoned photography and worked in other areas but it was impossible to simply surrender. And I left… From that point on, the goal became clear, I wasn't afraid of the criticism, all the persecution dimmed.' In photographing factories, parades, exercises, the concrete legacy of the labour camps, Rodchenko documented the physical birth of the Stalinist ideology, in all its perversions and all its new shapes. His visions of the new Moscow architecture, as it was being built, meant that in effect he took the city's 'portrait'. And his photographs of his friend Mayakovsky (who was also celebrated and then artistically crushed by the regime) surely serve as some of the most striking author portraits of the century. Rodchenko made real, and found artistic beauty in, what otherwise seems an abstract, historical hell.

'Photograph and be photographed,' he once said. 'Record a person's life not a single "synthetic" portrait, but in a mass of instantaneous shots made at different times and in different conditions. Write the truth. Value everything that is real and contemporary. And we will be real people, not actors.’ The metaphor may be extended: photograph the country, its places, instances, people - and we will see the USSR emerge viscerally - not just a list of synthetic, historical facts. Few exhibitions will open in London this decade, which are compelling on so many levels, as 'Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography '.

At the Hayward Gallery till 27 April 2008.