![]() While the work of Margarita Tupitsyn and Erika Wolf has confirmed the extended life of the photographic avant-garde well into the late 1930s, from Rodchenko’s photo-stills to El Lissitzky’s photomontages in USSR in Construction, this article will diversify the representative works and photographers in this Soviet canon to include Mikhail Prishvin. How can a photograph alone capture the whole of Soviet space-industry, production, peoples? How can a single snapshot capture progress over time, from the ages of backwardness before the revolution to the success of the Five-Year Plans? Just at its moment of greatest saturation in print media, the camera’s limited scope potentially threatened the photographic experiments of both experimental modernists like Rodchenko and the out-of-time and out-of-place Prishvin. ![]() With the rise of Socialist Realism, the strategies employed in creating and reading photographs were necessarily reformulated, reflecting the central tensions surrounding the visualization of everyday objects, people, and production within the Soviet Union. In so doing, modernist photographers, like Rodchenko and other members of the October (Oktiabr’) group, became easy targets in the heated discourses over shifting attitudes towards photographic and textual representation in the 1930s. The photographic avant-garde, largely through the pages of the periodical press, would also teach a viewing public how to read their new world, defamiliarizing everyday objects with extreme close-ups and the cutting and reassembling of photographs into new collaged and montaged worlds. However, wielding a camera is but one part of photographic literacy. This democratically empowering call would also inspire the worker photography movement, a burgeoning number of author-photographers, and well-known avant-garde artists to employ the camera in their own framings of a volatile Soviet experience. Just as the USSR achieved universal literacy in general, so too will it have photographic literacy in particular.” Soviet citizens en masse would now have access to portable means of organizing both time (the watch) and space (the camera). ![]() A few years before Prishvin received his first Leica camera, Anatolii Lunacharskii, the Commissar of Enlightenment during the most open period of Soviet artistic expression, linked a vision of the new nation with photographic literacy, stating in 1926: “Just as every forward-looking comrade must have a watch, so must he be able to handle a camera. Prishvin was an avid photographer in the tumultuous years of 1925–1936, just as photography was providing new ways of documenting and mapping the rapidly changing political and social reality of the nascent Soviet state. ![]()
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