Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust

2. Seeing Red: Jewish Photographers, The Rise of the Second Generation, and Soviet Photojournalism of the 1930s

• 31 • • 2 • Seeing Red jewish photographers, the rise of the second generation, and soviet photojournalism of the 1930s The first generation of Soviet photographers, like other artists, writers, and cultural activists, wrestled with questions of aesthetics, politics, and ideology throughout the 1920s. Was socialist art created by the working classes? Was it simple and accessible to the working classes? Was it meant to throw off the aesthetics of the past and usher in an entirely new visual language? What role would new technology play in the building of a new society? Through the 1920s, modernist trends reigned supreme in magazines such as LEF that had small print runs. Artists, architects, sculptors, and photographers glamorized the construction of a new society using the new language of constructivism, futurism, and other movements that were popular in the rest of Europe. At the same time, with publications such as Ogonyok emerging, photography also functioned as a feature of the mass media that was reaching millions of readers. Thus, a photograph in a newspaper or an illustrated magazine told a simple news story to the average reader through clever montages, close-ups, and unusual angles, as Fridlyand does in an image of a parachutist (Fig. 2.1). Photographing from high above, Fridlyand figures the everyday in a new light. He also brilliantly plays with light and dark and shadows. Most Soviet photographers of the 1920s agreed that photography needed to elevate socialism. The leaders of the Soviet Union recognized from its first years that photography and film were important means of projecting and celebrating their new experiment, both at home and abroad. From its earliest years, Soviet photojournalism diverged from some of the practices of 1920s street photographers in the United States, such as those working in New York’s Lower East Side or Harlem, who often saw their role as social critics, rather than cheerleaders. For some prerevolutionary photographers, the shift from czarist to Soviet photographic culture simply meant replacing one set of iconic leaders with another. Nappelbaum continued taking portraits, but instead of photographing the aristocratic elite, he photographed the new Soviet elite. And in the 1920s, many photographic styles, genres, and ideologies existed simultaneously. One of the most well-known art photographers, Alexander Grinberg, primarily a pictorialist, flourished in the relatively open aesthetic atmosphere of the NEP 1920s. when photography was jewish • 32 • figure 2.1. Semyon Fridlyand, Parachutist, 1920s. Courtesy of the Dalbey Photographic Collection at the University of Denver. At the same time, our Jewish photographers were building a new profession called Soviet photojournalism, clustered around the figure of Koltsov. His magazine, Ogonyok, had become the most important illustrated journal in the country and had established its own publishing house on Strastnoi Bul’var. In 1926, he launched Soviet Photo (Sovetskoe foto) as a forum for photojournalists across the country. The very title of this periodical showed how these early photojournalists wanted to define themselves as distinctly Soviet and to show that art photographers such as Grinberg were not. In the first issue, the editors laid out their vision of the field of photography: “In the USSR photography is still in the hands of a few. The uncoordinated ‘art photography’ of handicraft professionals, the narrow circles of refined photo artists, the ‘gastronomes’ of photography, the active and lively but quite modest in quantity group of photo-reporters, and the quite large but disorganized and unaided cadres of amateurs—here for the time being is our ‘photographic society.’”1 This passage breaks the world of Soviet photography into four groups with implicit class affiliations. As historian Erika Wolf has noted, “The ‘handicraft professionals’ refers to studio and street photographers, who plied photography as a craft trade or cottage industry. These photographers are depicted as the backward remnants of an antiquated economic order. Similarly, art photographers are castigated as decadent bourgeois ‘gastronomes ’ of photography, another obsolete group with no future in the new Soviet culture . In contrast, photo-reporters and the ‘cadres of amateurs’ are described in more positive terms with proletarian overtones.”2 The magazine’s subtitle indicated at which group the journal was aimed: “A monthly magazine devoted to questions from amateur photographers and photo-reporters.” It is important to remember that these Soviet Jewish photographers were working in only one branch of Stalin-era photography, emerging photojournalism. There were many others, among them Nappelbaum’s portraits and Grinberg’s pictorialism. Photojournalists and their...