2/2010 Political and Economic Unions: Dialectics of Poverty, Wealth, and Political Domination

Soviet Nationalities Policy, “USSR in Construction”, and Soviet Documentary Photography in Comparative Context, 1931–1937 - 2

Timothy A. Nunan

2/2010

SOVIET DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY IN INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

“Simple layout. Some text. Emphasize what has been accomplished.”^[1]

Roy Stryker, On how to present travelling FSA exhibits

These photographs of, and reportage about, Soviet Central Asia in the USSR in Construction may be very striking. But what was distinctly Soviet about this kind of documentary photography? In order to bring this aspect of the photographs out, it may be instructive to turn to the work of a project that was similar in form if not in content to that of the photographers for USSR in Construction: the work of the Photography Group of the American Farm Security Administration (FSA). Founded in 1935 as the Resettlement Agency and renamed in 1937, the FSA was a major New Deal organization that organized public employment through the construction of experimental satellite suburbs as well as provided loans and agricultural education to poverty-stricken farmers. In the summer of 1935, the head of the then-Resettlement Agency, Rexford Tugwell, an agricultural economist, contacted his former economics graduate student Roy Stryker and asked him “to prepare a pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems, something that had always been dear to [Stryker’s] heart.”^[2] Stryker soon assembled a team of five American photographers – Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange – gave them reading materials on regions of the country, and a “shooting script” with directions for what to photograph.^[3] For example:

“Bill posters; sign painters-crowd watching a window sign being painted; sky writing; paper in park after concert; parade watching, ticker tape, sitting on curb; roller skating; spooners-neckers; mowing the front lawn.”

A creative tension soon emerged between Stryker and government officials in control of the program’s finances during the Depression. On the one hand, the FSA photographs that trickled in from the field (where photographers often spent up to six months at a time) were pushed to American publications at no cost in order to bring to national attention the third of the country that was “ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed.”^[4] FSA photographs were to remind the public forcefully of the challenges of rural poverty and maintain support for the New Deal; government administrators constantly insisted to Stryker that they “simply could not afford to hammer home anything except their message that federal money was desperately needed for major relief programs.” Stryker’s photographers thus had to walk a fine line between capturing photographs that were artistically moving and those that could be politically effective documents depicting American poverty. There was the issue of finding photos that could work in different presentation contexts: newspapers with larger-than-average black readerships in the South; the International Photography Exhibition in New York; and the Student Union at the University of Oklahoma.^[5] But at the same time, they also had to be careful to avoid obviously staged situations. In 1936 (an election year), for example, Republican newspapers in South Dakota embarrassed Rothstein by accusing him of staging photographs of a cattle skull in parched plains terrain. Scholars of the FSA have uncovered relatively few documents describing the reception of FSA photographs, although some of the comment cards from the International Photography Exhibition provide some idea of the range of responses.^[6] “Subjects very sordid and dull for an exhibition,” wrote one attendee, “[need] more nudes.”^[7] Still, another person was moved, if xenophobically so:

“The U.S. as a whole ought to be ashamed to have such conditions existing. Instead of sending money to help Jews and other foreigners, they should stop [groups] from sending money out of the country. I say help America first.”

Fig. 7. Farm Security Administration Exhibit: «In the Image of America,» at Museum of Science and Industry, New York City, 1941.

FSA photography serves as a valuable transnational comparative case for Soviet documentary photography because of the explicitly public and instrumental role photography was supposed to play and because photographers from both groups focused on similar themes: backwardness, government’s role in ameliorating poverty, and (in certain cases) the moral, intellectual, and material improvement of subalterns or minorities – Central Asians, especially Central Asian women, in the case of USSR in Construction, and African-Americans in the case of the FSA photographers. There are, of course, difficulties with this comparison. FSA photographs were used in a wide variety of contexts, from exhibits at Grand Central Station to mainstream American magazines, while USSR in Construction represents examining only one (albeit important) context in which Soviet documentary photography appeared. Neither Stryker nor the FSA photographers were preoccupied with the link between documentary photography, narrative, and plot to the same extent as were their Soviet counterparts. Unlike Soviet documentary photography, where (as far as current scholarship has ascertained) our corpus remains limited to the publications themselves, the online archives of the FSA provide access to those images that were actually used as well as to those that photographers took, but that were left on the cutting board. In other words, the images selected to appear in the 1941 FSA “In The Image of America” exhibit do not correlate directly to those in issues of USSR in Construction that focused on southern Central Asia. Indeed, comparisons of Soviet photodocumentary practices with that of other countries besides America (Turkey, Italy, Germany) throughout the interwar conjecture may well prove more fruitful than the analysis presented here. Still, I want to propose that if we compare how both groups – for all of their differences – used, or did not use, documentary photography as a language to discuss the relationship between the law, gender, and power, the exercise may better inform our understanding of each of the projects.

Fig. 8. Joseph Rothstein, «The bleached skull of a steer on the dry sun-baked earth of the South Dakota Badlands» (1936). FSA. Library of Congress.

Take, for example, the depiction of courtroom scenes involving subaltern or minority groups.^[8] In the 1931 issue of USSR in Construction, Max Alpert photographed the interior of a courtroom in Tajikistan, depicting what appears to be a panel of three judges (two men and one unveiled woman) presiding over several others: three men, two women wearing horsehair veils, two younger girls without veils, and a young boy.

Fig. 9. «A courtroom. One of the judges is a Tajik woman. She was the first woman in the city to discard her veil after the revolution. Standing opposite the desk is the figure of a female veiled in a blue, heavy, bag-like ‘parandja.’ She is only 16 years of age. She has come to complain that her husband beats her.» From USSR in Construction. 1936. 10. n.p.

USSR in Construction placed the courtroom scene within a greater narrative of woman’s liberation (most visible through unveiling of the horsehair veil) enabled by Soviet power.^[9] A photograph below showed a group of eighteen unveiled woman following an instructor in physical exercises on a public square, with the caption: “Going in for some physical culture on the square facing the Women’s pedagogycal [sic] institute on Bainliunilyali street. These will never be forced to wear a ‘parandja.’”^[10] Photographs on the opposite page showed “students of the Institute for Music” – unveiled adult women – as well as a local unveiled woman at work at a textile mill. The caption above her read: “My husband was addicted to opium. I heard that a new silk factory was opening, so I divorced him and went to work.” The courtroom scene works, in other words, as part of a larger story of the benefits Soviet rule has brought to Tajik women: the ability to control their lives through the judiciary (whether as judges themselves or plaintiffs who will be taken seriously), the ability to escape the dark confines of the veil for open spaces and exercise (in many ways a metaphor for the “opening” of Central Asia by Soviet rule), and the right to define their own lives independent of men in their lives.^[11]

Fig. 10. «My husband was addicted to opium. I heard that a new silk factory was opening, so I divorced him and went to work.» USSR in Construction. 10. 1931. n.p.

Still, if we compare this courtroom scene to similar scenes from FSA photography that purported to show the just workings of the American legal system, a more nuanced picture may emerge. Consider the production of the summer 1941 exhibit “In the Image of America.” Here it becomes clear that while some American photographers took risks in their photography of minorities’ relationship with the law, the public presentation of their photographs remained less provocative than that of their Soviet counterparts. “In the Image of America,” which was organized by Edwin Rosskam (Stryker’s “visual information specialist”) and presented as a 200-photograph exhibit of rural life in America at Rockefeller Center in New York in conjunction with the Photographic Society of America (PSA), sought to “present, in most abbreviated form, a panoramic sketch of country – this vast, rich continent – and our country’s people, strong in their variety.”^[12] If one scans the panel of the exhibit devoted to democratic processes for images of African-Americans, one finds no images of blacks.

Fig. 11. Farm Security Administration Exhibit: «In the Image of America,» Part of Exhibit on Science and Industry, Rockefeller Center, New York City, 1941. FSA. Library of Congress.

But the photograph of two defendants standing before a judge in a courtroom, all under a Masonic “eye of God” decoration, near the top left of the panel, hides a unique story. The shot that Rosskam selected originated from a series of photographs taken on court day in Rustburg, Virginia, by John Vachon.^[13] Yet far from the shot chosen for the exhibit, which obscured the defendant’s racial identity thanks to the shawl, hat, and collar covering the back of the woman’s head, Vachon had actually devoted much of his filming to explore the provocative racial undercurrent to the trials. The two other photographs he took of the couple before the judge used tricks of perspective to emphasize the power dynamic of the black couple standing, arms crossed, below the bulk of the white judge, the “eye of God” symbol above him, and the portraits of white Virginian notables. In the next photograph, the black man almost appears to partly support his weight on the table under the gaze of the judge. Vachon had the eye to use vertical composition to show the difference in power between white judge and black citizen in Rustburg, but when it came time for Rosskam to select among his photographs for public display to a mainstream American audience at Rockefeller Center, she chose the photograph that most blurred this white/black power relationship. As one scholar has written, “the defendants could have been any Americans on trial, and the image became as prosaic as that of the Pie Town, New Mexico, community meeting beside it.”

Fig. 12. «Court Day. Rustburg, Virginia.» Featured in 1941 FSA exhibit. FSA. Library of Congress.

Fig. 13. John Vachon. Court Day. Rustburg, Virginia.

Fig. 14. John Vachon. Court Day. Rustburg, Virginia.

If we turn back to the depiction of the Tajik courtroom scene in USSR in Construction, what new conclusions can we draw about it or its “uniquely Soviet” nature (if any)? On one level, when compared with Vachon’s courtroom photographs, Alpert’s shot stands out for its horizontality: unlike the more critical Vachon photographs with their clear emphasis on the top/bottom power dynamic between the white judge and the black defendant, or even the photograph that appeared in “In the Image of America” with the unidentified defendants below the judge and “the eye of God,” the Tajik court scene depicts almost all of the participants in the trial at the same level; the wife-beating husband, the sixteen-year-old wearing the veil, and the rest of the men, women, and children in the courthouse either sit or stand on the floor below the raiser on which the judges sit, but the angle of the photograph serves neither to diminish nor glorify any of them.
What might one say about the uniquely Soviet nature of Alpert’s photograph? Compared to Vachon, who sought to make the judge himself the subject of the composition, Alpert focuses more on the legal system and respect for the law itself. Whereas in Vachon’s photograph (in the two that were not printed) much emphasis was placed on the judge himself as an agent of a legal system dominated by whites through perspective and composition, in Alpert’s photograph no one comes across as particularly charismatic or as the dominant figure in the photograph. While the female judge may have, according to the caption, been something of a radical, Alpert presents her in front of a wall sketch of a parandja, but with her eyes down, her hands at the table, and at the edge of the photograph, she hardly dominates the composition. The focal point, if anywhere, of the photograph lies on the wife-beating husband. He stands at the center of the frame, judged simultaneously both by the judicial officials (an unveiled woman and two or three men) and by a cross-section of Tajik society: veiled and unveiled women, a man, and two children. Not individual characters acting out racial animus, but a variety of state and societal actors enforcing justice assisting innocent teenage women to punish their male oppressors: such is the drama that Alpert’s photograph acts out. Women’s liberation was, as the Tajik caption to these pages said, but a part of mankind’s greater ascent towards total control of its own social condition.^[14]
Of course, Soviet documentary photography in Central Asia also shared some traits with its American counterpart. Both groups had to find a happy medium between depicting the progress that state-sponsored social transformation had already made in the provinces and showing the backwardness that remained and still had to be overcome. Here one compared the kishlak of Dushanbe to the modern streets of Stalinabad; there one showed the transformation of the “Negro Farmer” and his family from a shanty farmhouse to a sturdy house with porch.^[15] Alpert, Shaikhet, and Piatakov as well as Vachon, Lange, and Stryker operated in strangely parallel positions of having to communicate the simultaneous backwardness and moral progress of native aliens (blacks or Soviet Muslims) to either more white-bread American audiences or international cosmopolitans. (The United States did not, to my knowledge, have an equivalent to USSR in Construction, depicting to international audiences the appeal of the New Deal project as a road to modernity.)
Still, the public memories of these two photographic projects remain quite different from one another. Taken and redacted as they were during a transitional period in Soviet photodocumentary politics and practices, few of the photographs from USSR in Construction retain the emotional power of their American counterparts. Consider the two groups’ treatment of backwardness. Many of the American photographs, such as Lange’s “Power farming displaces tenants. Texas Panhandle. 1938,” document the technological and structural economic changes that have erased the old way of life for family farms and small towns without denigrating the dignity of its subject. The abandoned family house in Lange’s 1938 composition invites compassion from its viewer: where have its inhabitants gone? Looking at the photographs of the Soviet photographs, meanwhile, not the introspection of the camera lens as it examines the antediluvian world but rather the contempt with which it photographs the Dushanbe kishlaks, the emphasis on the new world of Vakhshstroi as opposed to the journey from Darvaz, strikes the viewer. In contrast to the respect for the past seen in the FSA photographs of economically shattered Southern sharecroppers and Dust Bowl farmers in FSA photography, one finds in USSR in Construction photography a ruthless confidence in the new world brought to the periphery. We read El Registan’s Mosaic story of the Stalin Constitution flown in by plane to the Western Pamirs for discussion by Shugnan collective farmers; we see V. Kinelovsky’s photograph of a Pamiri girl awestruck upon seeing an airplane for the first time as the Russian pilot beside her grins (Fig. 16): technological fetishism married to an atemporal story of the West bringing progress to the East. We find here, in the words of the art historian Max Kozloff, “not the confidence of the present as it studies the living past, but the spectacle of the past awakened to a future that does not exist.”^[16]

Fig. 15. Dorothea Lange. Power farming displaces tenants. Texas Panhandle. 1938. FSA. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C.

When it comes to portraiture of the backward or subaltern, the difference between the two modes of photography becomes even clearer. Lange’s Migrant Mother and Walker Evans’s photographs of Allie Mae and Floyd Burroughs were, like many of the photographs for USSR in Construction, staged photographic constructions of rural poverty, ignorance, and backwardness. They, like their Soviet counterparts, were originally taken to justify policies that would turn the backward countryside into a laboratory for experimentation in new ways of living. Still, the FSA photographs (and the later work of Evans for the project that would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) retain an awareness of the dignity of the humble subjects that USSR in Construction rarely emanated.^[17] FSA photographs such as Gordon Parks’s “American Gothic, Washington D.C.” are taken from human perspectives (at the level of the human eye); their subjects remain aware that a human eye behind the lens is photographing them. In contrast to this, Shaikhet’s photographs of Tajik collective farmers are taken from the navel up, or from the ground. “These moments,” writes Kozloff, “instead of being momentary, were meant to endure by virtue of their contrast with any conceivable psychological viewpoint. They do not accord with the perspectives of social human beings but rather with creatures that fly or crawl.”^[18] Their subjects, removed from any context that would identify them with a concrete political cause or historical background that would render conditional their optimism and hope in the future, remain of the voyeuristic gaze of the camera that inspects them.^[19] Taken at a moment when Soviet pho-todocumentary practices found themselves between the Borgesian encyclopedic and momentary ideals of the factographic program and the total art of Stalinism and socialist realism, which itself “became, with few exceptions, a collection of material for cultural historians,” few of the photographs from its pages retain popular appeal in Russia or the post-Soviet countries today.^[20] Indeed, it perhaps remains most remembered as an archive of Soviet terror – of the construction of the White Sea Canal and (to a much lesser extent) the Fergana Canal – than as a daguerreotype of a Soviet Eurasia on the eve of its total transformation.

Fig. 16. Kinelovsky, «At the Khorog Aerodrome.» USSR in Construction. 12. 1936. n.p.

* * *

What to make of USSR in Construction in the end? In this article, I have tried to explore how Soviet documentary photography, in particular that of USSR in Construction, promoted an image of Soviet nationalities policy and a narrative of the Soviet transformation of southern Central Asia that was – more than at odds with the idea of state-sponsored evolutionism espoused by other Soviet institutions – confusing, muddled, and without clear thrust. Soviet photographers and editors may have become extremely technically adept in their photographic and publishing techniques, but they were often, to refer to the Benjamin quotation with which I began this essay, photographically illiterate. Even as captioning and telling a story to accompany their photographs became a major part of issues of USSR in Construction, the magazine’s editors struggled with managing

“...the instructions that rest in the authenticity of photography. Not always can one circumvent them with a reportage whose clichés have only the effect of linguistically associating themselves in the viewer. The camera becomes smaller and smaller, ever more ready to hold fast to fleeting and secret pictures whose shock awakens the association mechanism in the viewer.”^[21]

Having failed to find those moments of daily life that, when inscribed on film, could alone document the success of the Soviet project, USSR in Construction resorted to captioning, “which implicates photography in the literarification of all living conditions” – and yet still the attempt to find a coherent narrative failed. The picture, then, that international audiences received of the transformations within the Soviet Union regarding non-Russian nationalities was erratic. Who was a tribe? Who was a narodnost’? Could backwardness be overcome given the proper social and economic conditions? Apparently, few among the editorial staff could respond to these questions at a moment when the terms of the political debate on nationalities as well as the limits of their photographic language itself were in flux. These photographs may have sated readers’ curiosity about Soviet Central Asia, but they hardly answered the more fundamental questions about the Soviet project. Given the modern Russian and international amnesia toward any individual photograph from the USSR in Construction corpus, they failed – as I have suggested through the comparison of Soviet with FSA photography – to produce enduring artistic images.

Fig. 17. Gordon Parks. American Gothic. Washington D.C. (Photograph of Ella Watson).

Fortunately, USSR in Construction – to say nothing of other contemporary publications such as Sovetskoe Foto (Soviet Photo), Daesh’ (Let’s Give), 30 Dnei (30 Days), or 24 chasa iz zhizni moskovskoi rabochei sem’i (24 Hours from the Life of a Moscow Working Family) – provides just such a valuable source for future explorations into the intersections between avant-garde, nationalities policy, and comparative empire as concerns the USSR of the 1930s. Whether one examines USSR in Construction in its own right or uses its coverage of particular regions or trends in the USSR in the 1930s and early 1940s as supporting material for other projects, its exuberant style and sweeping thematic and geographical range, and, above all, its photography make it a compelling resource for the student of Soviet history, the self-understanding of the Soviet project by the avant-garde, or the use of photography by modernizing states in the 1930s more broadly.^[22] As historians of Russia and the Soviet Union move more in coming years to examine the histories of Central Asia, the Caucasus, non-European Russia, and the postwar Soviet Union in a global comparative context, the use of visual media produced by the Soviet and other avant-gardes – and an increased visual literacy – will play an import role in this new historiography of twentieth-century Eurasia.

Fig. 18. Max Alpert. Photograph of Tajik. USSR in Construction. 1936. 10. n.p.

USSR in Construction, for all of its gaps, was one of the major photographic exponents of the prewar part of this history – a period, that, as Adeeb Khalid, Adrienne Edgar, and Stephen Kotkin have argued, was replete with visions of technical, economic, and even gender modernity never fully pursued after the “interwar conjecture.” Having examined in real detail only three issues of USSR in Construction that have focused on the geographically small region of southern Central Asia, I cannot but feel that I have only scratched the surface. But as students of the Soviet project trained less specifically as art historians than historians per se turn their attention to this product of the Soviet avant-garde, perhaps the interval of some eighty years that separates today’s questions from the rotogravure of USSR in Construction “will discharge its historical tension,” and invite new and exciting approaches to this period.^[23] It is “in the shine of these rays,” to evoke Benjamin once more, that these photographs may fully emerge, “so beautifully and coyly from the darkness of the days of our grandfathers.”

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Footnotes

1.Roy Stryker. Letter to Herbert Mayer. 8 May 1939 // Library of Congress. Washington, DC. RA/FSA/OWI Written Records. Microfilm Reel 3.↩

2.Roy Stryker, quoted in Nancy Wood. Portrait of Stryker. In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs / Ed. Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood. London, 1974. P. 11.↩

3.Like many of the photographers for USSR in Construction, the FSA photographers were by and large quite young. In 1935, at the time of the project’s inception, for example, Rothstein was 20, Mydans was 28, Evans was 32, Shahn 37, and Lange 40. While far more has been written on these American photographers than their Soviet counterparts, I have included the following biographical information: Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985) was an American photographer who became involved in the FSA project after working as a student aide to Stryker at Columbia; Carl Mydans (1907-2004) was an American photographer who, in addition to his work for the FSA project, distinguished himself through his war photography from the Philippines and China during World War II; Walker Evans (1903-1975) was an American photographer who also worked as a writer an editor for Time and Fortune magazine following World War II; Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was a Lithuanian-born American social realist photographer and artist, who, in addition to his work for the FSA project, was best-known for his 1932 painting “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” and his 1965 cover portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. for Time; Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was an American photojournalist best known for her work with the FSA project, but who also co-founded the photography journal Aperture.

Notes

[1]Roy Stryker. Letter to Herbert Mayer. 8 May 1939 // Library of Congress. Washington, DC. RA/FSA/OWI Written Records. Microfilm Reel 3.

[2]Roy Stryker, quoted in Nancy Wood. Portrait of Stryker. In This Proud Land: America 1935-1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs / Ed. Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy Wood. London, 1974. P. 11.

[3]Like many of the photographers for USSR in Construction, the FSA photographers were by and large quite young. In 1935, at the time of the project’s inception, for example, Rothstein was 20, Mydans was 28, Evans was 32, Shahn 37, and Lange 40. While far more has been written on these American photographers than their Soviet counterparts, I have included the following biographical information: Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985) was an American photographer who became involved in the FSA project after working as a student aide to Stryker at Columbia; Carl Mydans (1907-2004) was an American photographer who, in addition to his work for the FSA project, distinguished himself through his war photography from the Philippines and China during World War II; Walker Evans (1903-1975) was an American photographer who also worked as a writer an editor for Time and Fortune magazine following World War II; Ben Shahn (1898-1969) was a Lithuanian-born American social realist photographer and artist, who, in addition to his work for the FSA project, was best-known for his 1932 painting “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti” and his 1965 cover portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. for Time; Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was an American photojournalist best known for her work with the FSA project, but who also co-founded the photography journal Aperture.

[4]Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937 // http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos2.asp (last visited July 7, 2010).

[5]Nicholas Natanson. The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography. Knoxville, 1992. Pp. 221-222.

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Soviet Nationalities Policy, “USSR in Construction”, and Soviet Documentary Photography in Comparative Context, 1931–1937 - 2

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