From the Photo-Series to Extended Photo-Observation

Abstract

From the to Extended Photo-Observation/' which appeared in Proletarskoe foto with Max AVpert and Arkadii Shaikhet's famous photo-essay A Day in the Life of a Moscow Working-Class Family, borrowed many of its arguments from TreViakov's 1929 article Biography of the Object and transposed them from the earlier discussion of narrative, mutatis mutandis, into the field of photography. Like Biography of the Object, which disputed the Ptolemaic idealism of the psychological novel, From the Photo-Series challenged the conceit of portraiture to provide a comprehensive image of the individual without any indication of his productive relations to society. And also like the earlier essay, From the Photo-Series consequently explored the possibilities for a practice that, instead of atomizing and monumentalizing the individual, would situate him within the social fabric of his day. For TreViakov, the photo-series and extended photo-observation were above all techniques for reestablishing the connections between the individual and the social environment that are obscured in traditional portraiture. Within the medium of photography, this meant harmonizing the discrepancy between subject and background. On this count, From the Photo-Series draws upon Osip Brik's 1928 From the Painting to the Photograph, an essay in which Brik exposed the latent humanism of a linear perspective that extracts objects from their setting, isolates them from one another, and then redistributes them within an ideologically structured pictorial field: Differentiating individual objects so as to make a pictorial record of them is not only a technical, but also an ideological phenomenon. . . . We need a method whereby we can represent [the] individual persona not in isolation, but in connection with other people. . . . Photography can capture him together with the total environment and in such a manner that his dependence on the environment is clear and obvious. l The goal for both Brik and TreViakov was to produce not a portrait of the individual, but rather a picture of a collective subject.