Aleksandr Rodchenko: Woman with a Leica or ‘Letters not about Love’

Abstract

At the end of his essay for the catalogue of the Aleksandr Rodchenko retrospective at the Museum of Modem Art, Peter Galassi characterized Rodchenko's late photographs as illustrations of the photographer's ‘mood of resignation’. This, he claimed, ‘is more effectively expressed in a handful of personal photographs of the early and mid-1930s, such as the famous Woman with a Leica, a portrait of Rodchenko's student Evgeniia Lemberg' (figure 1).1 By attempting to politicize Rodchenko's non-commissioned photography, Galassi placed himself in opposition to other scholars, who had singled out this very image as a demonstration of Rodchenko's successful escape from the prison-house of his socio-political specificity. Admirers of Woman with a Leica thought that this was a photograph where the subject was detached from the immediate Soviet context and matched the array of visual and thematic aspirations that were shared by all modernist photographers at the time.