9 tretiakov photo series

7/28/2019 9 Tretiakov Photo Series

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From the Photo-Series toExtended Photo-Observation*

SERGEI TRETIAKOV

OCTOBER 118, Fall 2006, pp. 7177. 2006 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

From the Photo-Series to Extended Photo-Observation, which appeared inProletarskoe foto with Max Alpert and Arkadii Shaikhets famous photo-essayA Day inthe Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family, borrowed many of its arguments fromTretiakovs 1929 article The Biography of the Object and transposed them from the earlierdiscussion of narrative, mutatis mutandis, into the field of photography. Like TheBiography of the Object, which disputed the Ptolemaic idealism of the psychological novel,From the Photo-Series challenged the conceit of portraiture to provide a comprehensiveimage of the individual without any indication of his productive relations to society. Andalso like the earlier essay, From the Photo-Series consequently explored the possibilities for apractice that, instead of atomizing and monumentalizing the individual, would situate himwithin the social fabric of his day. For Tretiakov, the photo-series and extended photo-obser-vation were above all techniques for reestablishing the connections between the individual

and the social environment that are obscured in traditional portraiture. Within the mediumof photography, this meant harmonizing the discrepancy between subject and background.On this count, From the Photo-Series draws upon Osip Briks 1928 From the Painting tothe Photograph, an essay in which Brik exposed the latent humanism of a linear perspectivethat extracts objects from their setting, isolates them from one another, and then redistributesthem within an ideologically structured pictorial field: Differentiating individual objects soas to make a pictorial record of them is not only a technical, but also an ideological phenome-non. . . . We need a method whereby we can represent [the] individual persona not inisolation, but in connection with other people. . . . Photography can capture him togetherwith the total environment and in such a manner that his dependence on the environment is

clear and obvious.1

The goal for both Brik and Tretiakov was to produce not a portrait ofthe individual, but rather a picture of a collective subject.

* Ot fotoseriik dlitelnomu fotonabliudeniiu, Proletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931), pp. 2043.1. Osip Brik, From Painting to Photograph, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documentsand Critical Writings, 19131940, ed. Christopher Phillips, trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: MetropolitanMuseum of Art, 1989), pp. 23031.


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72 OCTOBER

Whereas Brik claimed that the individual snapshot was particularly well-suited toapprehend both the person and his environment, the moment thus photographed was notsuitably comprehensive for Tretiakov. As he explains in the following text, there are twowaystwo montage proceduresthat are available to enhance the snapshots contingent

record: the photo-series and extended photo-observation. The critical difference between thetwo is the element of time. While the photo-series provides a quantitative inventory of pic-tures out of which the viewer synthesizes a composite image of the object, extendedphoto-observation makes possible the qualitative perception of aprocess. The result wouldbe a time-image, to employ the term Deleuze used to describe Eisensteins cinema. 2 Andindeed the methodological kinship between Eisenstein and Tretiakov, two longtime collabora-tors, should not be surprising given the structural affinities between cinema and thephoto-essay. In From the Photo-Series, Eisensteins notion of intellectual montage inspiresTretiakovs method of taking the incommensurable and accidental snapshot and, by conjugat-ing it temporally, giving it the weight and significance of generality [obobshchenosti].Without this generality, the photograph remains just an isolated, atomized phenomenon.

But by incorporating the dimension of time, the photograph becomes a mode of cognition, adialectical image. What Tretiakov describes here is not just an aesthetic practice, but amedium for materialist thought.

*

In publishing this commentary by Comrade Tretiakov, the editors con-sider it necessary to indicate in advance their disagreement with severalof the authors theses, in particular with his assertion that photographyis taking the place of painting.

The editors will subsequently provide a detailed critique of ComradeTretiakovs erroneous claims.

The face is the mirror of the soul, proclaimed idealist art, and generationsof painters mastered the technique of condensing the comprehensive image ofthe entire person into a single face by breaking down all the facts of his psychol-ogy, biography, profession, public activity, daily life, and habits into his wrinkles,eye color, locks of hair, and the zigzag of his profile.

Naturally there was no room for movement. And within the portrait, it was

the subjects dominant temperament that found expression over everything else.One could only speculate about the kinds of ties that integrated him into societyand about the extent to which he was himself a product of his surrounding envi-ronment. But then again, there werent many enthusiasts who speculated aboutthis anyway, for they thought it essential only that the individual be derived from

2. See Thought and Cinema, in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinsonand Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 15673.


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some driving passion, that he demonstrate some elemental emotion. Clarifyingthe type and method of his social labor seemed tedious and insignificant.

Furthermore, the idealist portrait searched for the one moment that wouldexpress what was universal and eternal in the individual. Hence the relation of

this kind of portrait to the iconic representations of saints who are preserved forall eternity. And hence the expression on the face that is removed from any realaction, as well as the pose of traditional photographic portraitsan expressionthat exists in no human activity other than the activity of posing.

This frozenness, this isolation from the surrounding environment, thisreduction to a single face (and one that is captured in a most ineffectual posedexpression at that)all of this is also characteristic of the monument.

A case in point: The Avenue of the Shock-Workers in the Park of Culture andLeisure, where we see only the physiognomies of the subjects, the shapes of theirheads and their coiffures. But in no way do we comprehend their nature as shock-workers, the particular significance of these shock-workers for each of us, or the

commonalities that unite them as foremost in the ranks of the builders of socialism.It shows us neither what they did nor how they did it . The dialectical-materialist

method sees the person as a product of the reality that surrounds him and as a forcethat transforms this reality. It examines him in a state of flux, in contradiction.

And this is exactly why photography is replacing painting and becoming theactive instrument of struggle in the hands of the proletariat: it is able to establishthe technical foundations for an active dialectical-materialist relation to the worldin a way that is immeasurably simpler and more comprehensive than painting.

Many years ago publishers and authors thought that the photograph was aninsult to the genuine artistic book, but today a book without photographs looks

inauthentic. Not long ago Rembrandts descendant was warmly welcomed at thedoor, while the photographer was driven away. Whereas today its utterly inconceiv-able how we could get by without the photographer who takes pictures of theFive-Year Plan, who takes pictures of the launch and growth of our industrial giants,and thereby carries out a great and authentic agitation through display [agitatsiiupokazom]. The juxtaposition, for example, of a photograph of a tiny village on aputrid little river with one taken a year later in which a glass building has replacedthe villagesuch stunning juxtapositions force you to radically reconsider the obso-lete notion of a human lifetime, for our centuryequals a millenniumin earlier times.

Composed only of individual photographs, books such as Deutschland berallesby Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield emerge as stunning documentary

indictments of their age, as concrete evidence of the crimes of capitalism thatrivals the most talented novels in expressivity, temperament, and impact.

It is no longer possible to talk about war with a single picture, be it aDelacroix or the skulls of Vereshchagin.3

From the Photo-Series 73

3. Vasilii Vereshchagin (18421904) was a controversial realist painter whose most famous work,The Apotheosis of War(1871), depicted a towering pyramid of skulls.


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Both of these methods of photographic impact represent the next stepbeyond the isolated snapshot.

The snapshot designates all kinds of life shot in motion, where posing iskept to an absolute minimum. If the painterly portrait (the monument, the icon)

was based on stasis and universal generalization, then the snapshot is dynamic.Therein lies its colossal contribution. It extracts individual moments of movementfrom the present stream of events without making people pose.

But the snapshot has its own internal flaw: the uniqueness and contingencyof what it depicts. Only rarely does the snapshot capture a moment that is charac-teristically expressive, a moment that reveals an essential internal contradiction.

As a rule, snapshots are contingent. In order to provide the contingent ges-ture, expression, and action with the weight and significance of generality, it isnecessary to enhance the moment either quantitatively or qualitatively. After com-paring a series of photographs that show the same phenomenon in differentcountries or in different operations, we will select an isolated, contingent photo-

graph that is among others like it, and make it representative of a general,characteristic, and important phenomenon. In the same way we can take severalsnapshots of the same object, but in different phases of its development. Andthen, instead of a contingent apparition, even instead of an episode, a person sur-faces before us in all of the diverse connections that integrate him with hissurrounding environment, in all of the diverse contradictions that he overcomesin the course of developing.

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Max Alpert and Arakii Shaikhet.A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family. 1931. Published inProletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931).


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If one snapshot taken at random is a kind of infinitely thin scale [ cheshuika]that has been peeled off the surface of reality, then serial photography or pho-tomontage lets us feel the true weight of one of realitys dense layers.

The infelicity of our photo-chronicle results from the fact that it overwhelms

the spectator with an enormous quantity of these photographic scales haphaz-ardly, without unifying the chronicle within a totality. For example, consider thecenterfolds in our journals that tell about construction projects. Because they areso rarely held together by a core principle that reinforces them, these centerfoldsare taken to be either heaps of scrap metal or, at best, stockpiles of spare parts.

The fate of these objectsto be atomized and to disappear from the specta-tors consciousnessis also shared by the portraits of the shock-workers who alllook alike, who are photographed with indifference, and are in no way explainedor connected to each other.

Apparently Rodchenko already wrote in 1928 that it was necessary to con-struct portraits by combining different snapshots of the same person.4

The serial picture of the Filippov family produced by Soiuzfoto is valuableprecisely because it gives the subject of its depiction enormous substance, for wesee the person not as an individual, not in isolation, but as a particle in our activesocial tissue, connected by little roots along the most diverse lines: the line of pro-duction, that of the sociopolitical, the familial lines of everyday existence. Thevalue of this photo-biographical excerpt lies in its cross-section of the flux that wecall the life of the Filippov family, a family like many others among us.


4. Reference to Aleksandr Rodchenkos Against the Synthetic Portrait, for the Snapshot, which waspublished in Novyi lef, no. 4 (1928), pp. 1416; trans. in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era, pp. 23842.

Alpert and Shaikhet.A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family. 1931. Published inProletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931


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The method for taking pictures is correct. Only it should have been realizedmore consistently in its details and more meticulously, if you will. For example,there was no reason to photograph Filippov in the streetcar that he takes afterwork, and then insert that photo into the morning series as if it were a trip to the

factorywhen Filippov did not take the train to the factory while they were takingthe pictures.Similarly, if the photos of the streetcar were supposed to show it as it typically

is, there was no reason to photograph when it was half empty. As we know, todaysMoscow streetcar is stuffed to capacity at that hour.

They should have caught the discrepancy between the numbers in the cap-tion below the snapshot and the ones in the appended document that was meantto confirm them (the purchase at the coop and the invoice).

And finally, they should not have included the snapshot of the two girls withtennis rackets, which is obviously posed and, as far photographic traditions areconcerned, indistinguishable from snapshots of bourgeois celebrities at fashion-

able resorts.

OCTOBER76

Alpert and Shaikhet.A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-ClassFamily. 1931. Published inProletarskoe foto, no. 4 (1931).


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But all this is rather trifling when we consider the problem that the Filippovseries tries to tackle. And the interest shown abroad for this series demonstrates thatwe have found the correct militant journalistic orientation for serial photography.

Naturally we should now expect to see photo-series from those lives of peo-

ple on the collective farms, ofnatsmenov[people from the Caucasus], and ofworkers from various branches of production.Serial photography delivers a momentary cross-section that cuts through

the entire skein of relationships that entangle the individual. Unlike depictionswe have had until now, serial photography gives us the sensat ion of dramaticprogress. In particular, there was a very timely photo-series about a Germanworker liv ing under the condit ions of the economic crisis. The photo-ser iesshowed this worker in the same activities in which we saw Filippov.5 But clearly, weshould not restrict ourselves to these kinds of monographic photo shoots.

The sensation of movement should not be random. It can be integrated withinthe principles of our photo shoot. By grounding the work of the photo-chronicle in

the dialectic of socialist construction, one can represent this construction as a sin-gle, integral process of development.

The Filippov series is an initial incision. Next we can view this family throughextended photo-observation, noting every moment of growth and change in their con-dition. And since this change in the Soviet proletariat is advancing boldly, thenext year of work will allow us to collect an enormous amount of extremely valu-able and convincing material about the laws, obstacles, and pace of growth for oursocialist production and everyday life.

We are building according to plan, and we should also be photographingaccording to plan.

The series and extended photo-observation: this is the method.


5. Commissioned as a piece of Soviet propaganda for the international community, Alpert andShaikhets photo-essay first appeared in the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 38 (1931), under the title 24Stunden aus dem Leben einer Moskauer Arbeiterfamilie. It was followed ten issues later in AIZ, no. 48(1931), by Die deutschen Filipows, a collectively-produced reportage that documented a day in the lifeof the Fournes, a typical German proletarian family.