Dreams Decreed

Afterimage, Jan, 2000 by Noam Cohen

Langman's sins are hardly self-evident, but they do materialize in contrast to those who hewed closer to the official teachings, such as Mark Markov-Grinberg. (Apparently he added Markov to his name to make it seem less Jewish and in the Government-produced book Soviet Photography (1939), he is identified as M. Markov.) His photographs, such as Nikita lzotov, Distinguished Miner of Donbass (1934), are truly heroic in a shockingly uncritical way. Happy Maternity, Stavropol Territory (1935) lacks any complexity or artistic intent that could detract from its statement on peasant life.

In fact, it is only by consulting a book such as Soviet Photography that one can see how Bendavid-Val has struggled to select stimulating, complicated work. Her "propaganda," by contrast, includes few portraits of great leaders--an obvious staple of government work--and lacks saccharine work like Gregory Zelma's It's a Secret, (c. 1939) which shows two children conspiring in Norman Rockwell-like innocence. The renegade Langman has one work in the 1939 book, and it is tourist shot of the Soviet coast.

Still, there is a parallel between the work in Soviet Photography and the work Bendavid-Val selected. As she puts it, "the Soviets photographed progress." So in the Soviet half of "Propaganda and Dreams" there are paeans to new industrial machinery and new agricultural equipment, celebrations of the physically invigorated young men and women and a hardy welcome for those on the edges of the empire. Occasionally these themes run together as when we see a young soldier demonstrating the working of a phonograph to Asiatic Soviet people, or in Dmitri Debabov's Concert in Chukotka (1936) which depicts the performance of an oratorio accompanied with strings in a field with an Eskimo mother in a skin jacket with her child. But while such a photograph taken by an American photographer would have demanded some judgment from the viewer about the arrogance of such a project--and one would dwell on the Eskimo woman's eyes looking off in distraction--it is hard to know whether in those heady times this photograph failed to embody the Soviet intention of uplifting the people.

Perhaps nothing captures an American's inability to think through the meaning of the Soviet photographs like Viktor Bulla's Pioneers in Defense Drill, Leningrad (1937), the most profoundly unsettling photograph in the exhibit. Bulla's photograph of hundreds of children wearing gas masks was not meant to be ghoulish, a commentary on war or lost innocence, but rather exemplified a reason for pride--the country was blessed with well-trained, well-equipped and obviously courageous young fighters. Likewise, Markov-Grinberg's 1933 Public Letter to a slacker from record-breaking collective farmers, Stalingrad Region with the prongs of a pitchfork menacingly popping up from behind, might have inspired the populace, rather than showing the dangers of collective action.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the term "propaganda" for the photographs in this exhibit, especially for this time when mobile hand-held cameras were relatively new, is how time and history can distort its meaning. Ozymandias's propagandistic boast is Percy Bysshe Shelley's evidence of human folly. Likewise, once-uplifting Soviet photography now carries implicit warnings about groupthink and militarism and American work has a two-dimensionality that resolves little and only demands more questions about that period. As events proved more complex, the U.S.'s experiment with propaganda came to an end. Lange helped speed its decline when she was sent to chronicle one of America's darkest chapters--the internment of Japanese-Americans in California during World War II--and was often censored by officials who had qualms about the policy, endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court.