Béton Centre of Visual Culture presents the exhibition ‘Alphabet. Soviet Photography of the 1920s-1930s’. This is one of the most striking and important periods in the development of not only Russian but also world photography. The exhibition includes more than 100 works by 50 masters from the collection of Béton Centre of Visual Culture.

The exhibition presents only author’s authentic prints of that time. The authors are shown alphabetically, thus the curators of the project do not evaluate the contribution of this or that author to the development of photography of this period. In order to create a complete picture, along with famous masters such as Rodchenko, Shaikhet, Ignatovich, the exhibition also presents much less well-known names, among them, for example, Kudoyarov, Kislov, Shimansky.

In the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s, photography, like the rest of the country, underwent great changes. At this time, the formation of Soviet reportage was taking place against the background of the fading of the artistic principles of Pictorialism and the formation of a new visual language of the photographic avant-garde.

The members of the ‘October’ group adhered to the avant-garde constructivist direction in photography. Their innovative artistic techniques remained no less, and in some cases even more important than the relevance of the subject. Foreshortening, diagonal composition, active foreground, framing, emphasis on the silhouette of the subject – all these visual means contributed to the demonstration of familiar and generally boring industrial subjects from unusual points of view. According to the avant-garde artists themselves, such images were supposed to make the viewer look at the world in a new way, to infect him with the energy of revolutionary euphoria, to feel the grandiosity and rapidity of modern economic and social transformations. At the same time, in practice, the corresponding photographic images were often perplexing to the public because they were inexplicable from the point of view of the conservative notions of visual artwork held by the vast majority of the population. This made the respective images practically unsuitable for agitation and propaganda.

The need arose to find an adequate alternative to the visual concepts that already existed in photography in order to create a universal visual method that would be able to solve the entire range of propaganda tasks. This method, which later came to be called socialist realism, had to be both accessible to the masses, as convincing as possible, and at the same time capable of conveying a highly politically biased content under the mask of reality. The photographic images of socialist realism became visually pleasing to the viewer, which encouraged him to accept the political content of these works.

An important addition to the exposition will be the demonstration of original magazines ‘USSR at the construction site’, children’s books illustrated with photographs of the masters of this period. All this will create a complete picture of Russian photography of the 1920-1930s and will give the viewer the opportunity to analyse and be convinced of the validity of certain assessments.