Avant-garde and criticism of photography

At the beginning of its development photography was not regarded as an art medium and was associated with the world of science, engineering and 'material progress', which, according to Charles Baudelaire, was hostile to the nature of art. So the first attempts to integrate photography into the art system in the second half of the 19 century presupposed the correction of features of photo representation, which were considered anti-artistic. The art-photography used the traditional hand-made media - painting and graphic arts. At the age of avant-garde this strategy gave place to apologia of photo-medium, which was regarded as the basis of new poetics of fixing the facts and one of the means of cultural revolution. But we can find elements of criticism against photography by the use of photography in avant-garde too. The works by one of the leaders of Soviet and international photo-avant-garde, Alexandr Rod-chenko, are a typical example of this paradoxical strategy. As shown in the article, the basis of poetics of the works is the subjectisation of the literal surface of the picture, which demonstrates its genetic connection with the aesthetics of modernism. In fact, the photographer run counter to his theoretical views. So, in his programmatic text «Ways of Modern Photography» Rodchenko upheld advantages of the unexpected angles of representation ('top-to-bottom' and 'bottom-to-top') and as an argument expressed an opinion that such angles often correspond to our perception of things. But practically Rodchenko used various devices including the unconventional angles without any realistic justification. This use of the device for the sake of the device itself was the reason of discussion between Rodchenko and Boris Kushner, a writer, and one of ideologists of constructivism. Thus rehabilitation and even apologia of photography in avant-garde went along with a deep-rooted distrust of it and with the tendency to apply the logic of modernist painting to it.

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