Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin by Aglaya K. Glebova. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 256 pp. $65.00. ISBN 978-0-300-25403-7. Photographing Central Asia: From the Periphery of the Russian Empire to Global Presence by Svetlana Gorshenina. Worlds of South and Inner Asia. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022. viii + 431 pp. $118.99. ISBN 978-3-11-075442-1. In the thirty-some years since the visual turn, scholars across the humanities continue to develop inter- and transdisciplinary approaches to examining visuality, drawing on methods from ethnography, anthropology, history, art history, and many other fields. The history of photography in the former Russian and Soviet empires is no different: academics are superseding monolithic or singular interpretations of photographic collections through examining, locating, and (re)placing the photograph, as a source, at the intersections between scientific inquiry, art, history, colonialism and imperialism, center-periphery relations, and so on, with the aim of thoroughly uncovering the multiplicities evident in photography as a medium. At first glance the two recent publications under review here, although on Russian Imperial and Soviet photography, appear to have little in common. Photographing Central Asia is an edited volume dedicated primarily to investigating the tensions between Orientalist perspectives and local agency in late Imperial and early Soviet photographs of Turkestan; Aleksandr Rodchenko, meanwhile, is a monograph that examines a single artist and the eclecticism of his photographic artworks before, during, and after Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. Yet when read together, these texts point to many overlapping themes: the photograph’s relationship to “modernity” as conceived at the time, both a physical technological signifier of the modern and the ability to document the construction of modernity itself; the (if only momentary) contemporaneity of photography, its plurality of meaning and co-temporality of visualizing Imperial or Stalinist space; and, finally, photography’s ability to transcend and destabilize traditional interpretations about the flow of visual information and ideas, whether related to center-periphery relations or in the individual artist’s oeuvre. As Aglaya Glebova helpfully elucidates, the idea of modernity as contemporaneity is crucial to understanding the work of Soviet modernist photography, particularly for Rodchenko and others associated with the journal Lef. In Russian, sovremennost' (contemporaneity), as the author describes, linguistically links photography with concurrent, yet different, temporalities, both in rhetoric and in practice: “the idea of different realities that are co-temporal, embedded in the same moment” (p. 15). I posit that sovremennost' translated as “contemporaneity,” rather than “modern,” is a feature equally applicable to studies of Imperial and Soviet photography collectively, and not only the Soviet avant-garde, which employed the term for agitational purposes. The photographs, albums, and postcards discussed in Svetlana Gorshenina’s co-edited Photographing Central Asia are clearly also engaged in the process of what Glebova characterizes as espousing “the coexistence of the past and the present, the outdated and the just now, the durational and the future-oriented” (p. 15). While modernist photography in art historical terms is generally characterized by photographs produced between 1910 and 1950, contemporaneity might be described as the seminal characteristic of photography as a technological-historical phenomenon (in the wake Niépce’s Heliograph in 1827). Thus, as a medium, photography displaces and dislocates time and space by conjuring or “summoning” a past reality, whether recent or distant.1 The temporal plurality of photographs is a shared feature of Aleksandr Rodchenko and Photographing Central Asia, as both texts attempt to contend with the interaction between the individual artist(s) and institutions that dictated the creation and circulation of photographic works for various, sometimes competing, purposes. Sovremennost', or contemporaneity, is present in the “intertwined modernities” of Photographing Central Asia as a colonial project of exploring and subordinating Turkestan as a conquered region. While the information emanating from this pictorializing mission was not necessarily unidirectional, from center (Moscow) to periphery (Turkestan), the contributors to this volume rightly explore a variety of photographic phenomena through the lens of postcolonial theory and the (then) contemporary orientalization of the region. At times, this involved the “violent appropriation of the image of the ‘other’ for the purpose of scholarly, economic, ideological or social control” (p. 15). Ultimately, the volume admirably articulates the “shift [in] emphasis between the centre and the periphery, global and regional history, micro and macro.” In doing so, it “refocuses” the “marginal” to the center of the global history of visual imagery though investigating “cases that have been forgotten or have never previously been analysed” (pp. 16–17). In the repositioning of “peripheral” photography as part of global, transnational histories, Gorshenina describes photography in Turkestan as “on the margins of the marginal,” based on the “postcolonial context of the post-Soviet world” (pp. 1–2). Coming to terms with the Imperial Russian and Soviet colonial projects, the generous availability of some sources, in juxtaposition to the limited accessibility of others, renders the study of Turkestani photography a quagmire at best. Yet as a volume, Photographing Central Asia rejects Soviet-era photographic studies as objective reflections of the real. In each of the chapters in the volume, the authors question “the political bias of photography … as a tool of colonial enterprises, and its role in spreading hybrid modernity … in the Europeanisation, or Russification of Turkestani society” (p. 12). The incorporation of both decentered center-periphery relations and Orientalism, though not necessarily the blanket application of Edward Said’s iteration of the concept, complicates these histories, while also acknowledging the “self-orientalization,” the “self-referential,” and the “self-replicating” aspects of Orientalism and “othering.”2 The plurality of perspectives evident in the project of un-marginalizing Central Asian photography acknowledges “the intersection of institutions and discourses and their dissemination, introduction and reproduction” in the creation of “knowledge, particularly orientalist and orientalising knowledge” that complicate photographs as historical documents (p. 399). The chapters in Gorshenina’s co-edited volume proceed roughly chronologically and are divided into two parts, “Photography and Orientalism” and “Using and Reusing Photographs.” Felix de Montety, Laura Elias, and Anton Ikhsanov explore outsiders’ and government agents’ scientific approaches to photographing Turkestan for both ethnographic and anthropological purposes in the late Imperial period. Fusing contemporary ideas about objectivity, modernity, technology, and academic/scientific inquiry, these articles demonstrate how photography was scientifically applied to visualize ethnographic types, a process that slowly evolved over the second half of the nineteenth century. These investigations reveal that while the work of academics and artists, such as Charles-Eugnè de Ujfalvy, Samuil M. Dudin, and Alexandr N. Samoilovich, conformed to late nineteenth century practices about exoticizing Central Asia, they also did so with their own aspirations based on their scientific field, region of origin, and so on. When read together, however, these chapters also point to subtle changes in the scientific uses of photography, such as photographing subjects as they went about everyday life, rather than in a studio setting, to better capture the vanishing practices of locals in the face of fin-de-siècle changes occurring in Turkestan. Similarly, István Sántha and Lázló Lajtai explore the heterogeneity of Orientalism though the case of Hungarian polymath György Almásy, whose work was informed by his support of Turanism, which historically and linguistically linked Central Asia to Hungary. Thus, his images highlighted the specifically Hungarian Orientalist connections between European, Austro-Hungarian Imperial subjects and the “exotic” Kyrgyz peoples of Turkestan. Tatiana Saburova’s contribution further complements this chapter. She argues that botanist and geographer Vasilii V. Sapozhnikov’s photographs of Semirechie participated in the Imperial project, intended to create “a scientific record, and to map the territory … for its potential for colonisation and the introduction of civilization via agriculture and infrastructural development” (p. 186). The final chapter in this part of the text, by Tatiana Kotiukova, compares two photographic collections, the first organized by Count K. K. Pahlen and the second by engineer-hydrologist N. M. Shchapov. She demonstrates how their photographic observations were based on practical concerns about official inspections and irrigation plans, though both projects illustrate a changing (and from their view, improved) Turkestan through Russian Imperial intervention and governance. The next section of the volume begins with Natalia A. Mozokhina’s examination of prerevolutionary postcards, an unregulated visual media created and circulated through private publications. The state rarely censored these images, even though it funded the public institutions and archives that collected and preserved them for posterity. Additionally, Bruno De Cordier looks at two series of postcards, one of Aralsk and the other of Kazalinsk, commissioned by Aleksei Suvorin’s Moscow-based publishing agency. For Suvorin, the projects were about “(re)-invigorating national consciousness” reflecting “notions of territoriality” and the “impact of a number of [modernization] developments” in Turkestan (pp. 264–65). Helena Holzberger’s chapter debunks the assumed unidirectional movement of visual information from the center to periphery. In her examination of photojournalist Max Penson’s career from peripheral amateur to the ranks of all-Soviet photographer, Holzberger contends that the flow of photographic information in the early Soviet period was very much a circulatory (or circuitous) and dynamic process that invited participation from individuals like Penson in the “periphery.” Furthermore, she explains that while all-Union publications expressed a tendency to focus on ethnographic topoi, the local press only relied on these types “to illustrate stories from the past world, once again reflecting the incongruity of Soviet modernity” (p. 286). I highlight this point specifically, because I will return to it in my evaluation of Glebova’s monograph below. If the all-Union press did not completely abandon ethnographic photography, as Holzberger suggests, this assertion is supported by Natalia Lazarevskaia and Maria Medvedeva’s contribution, which returns to scientific uses of photography by the Academy for the History of Material Culture in the 1920s and 1930s, and draws on several themes addressed by scholars earlier in the volume. The collection of visual documents compiled by the Academy was a preservation project that encompasses a wide range of contemporary and current scientific applications across disciplines, including archeology and ethnography, anthropology and oriental studies, epigraphy to architecture, to name a few. Given the diversity of the collection, it offers a rich trove of visual information as the Academy’s researchers transitioned from nineteenth-century ethnographic photographic trends to non-staged shots of Soviet construction and Collectivization of agriculture in in Central Asia. This connects to the work’s concluding chapter by Svetlana Gorshenina, which examines how the circulation of “ethnic-type” photographs on Facebook contribute to the “formation of collective digital memories marked by various manifestations of nationalism, nostalgia and imperial ideology” (p. 329). These memories are informed by “anthropological classifications” of the late Imperial period, as well as Soviet and post-Soviet concepts of the nation, nationality, and ethnic groups. Ultimately, she finds that examining these visual documents discloses the extensive circulation of historical photographs of Turkestan online and how user’s interpretations participate in “information blending,” part of how social media engages with “globalisation, decentralisation, digital culture and the transnationality of users [who] have radically changed languages, practices and forms of memory around the world” (p. 391). In addition to the various ideas present in Photographing Central Asia, contemporaneity links the chapters of the edited volume to one another but also to Aglaya Glebova’s Aleksandr Rodchenko. Contemporaneity in all cases examined by the authors and editors are “of the present” but they are also co-temporally connected to the past and future. The subjects of the photographs, the sites of everyday life, and the geography of Central Asia that have since vanished but remain visually fixed in their past-present and circulated in the now-present, are related to Aleksandr Rodchenko’s oeuvre. Examined as a whole, Rodchenko’s collective photographic works reveal a heterogeneity of practices in which the artist “zig-zagged” between positioning his photographs as simultaneously future oriented, of the present, and “sometimes backward-looking” (p. 5). This occurred even at the height of the Soviet transformation of industry and agriculture, as Holzberger’s chapter in Photographic Central Asia likewise demonstrates in the work of Max Penson. In primarily examining Rodchenko’s lesser-known photographs, his “shadow oeuvre,” Glebova illuminates the tensions between the artist’s textual programmatic essays on photography, which were in sync with Soviet ideas about socialist modernity, and his actual practice. The latter often overlooked the dictates in his own theoretical writing. It furthermore follows Rodchenko’s creative trajectory, which pulled his photographic work in multiple directions, but ultimately concluded with his abandonment of photography as a medium that could accurately document contemporaneity without actively defacing his and his partner Varvara Stepanova’s projects (epitomized by their defacement of their own copy of 10 Years of Soviet Uzbekistan, an extravagant photobook they produced together). Glebova highlights the eclecticism of Rodchenko’s photographic works between roughly 1928 and 1938, combatting the assumption held by less recent studies that Soviet avant-garde artists were essentially complicit in the growing centralization, and increasingly totalitarian directives, of the Communist Party by the early to mid-1930s.3 Instead, Glebova posits that Rodchenko’s shadow oeuvre, representative of his eclecticism, was “self-reflexive,” “retrospective,” and “evidence of a grappling, an attempt to work out and think through the realities on the ground … which cannot be ascribed to singular categories of opposition or subservience” (p. 6). Looking at Rodchenko’s lesser-known compositional history, his investment in photography as a medium, and growing reliance on employment by commission, the author shows that he “took on a wide variety of subjects in his work, some of which he had little, if any, personal investment in; some that he may have been skeptical of; and some that exposed him to the regime’s exponential violence” (p. 7). His personal interests, coupled with his dependence on commissions, thus contend with an array of motivations when photographing the rapidly changing landscape, as the Soviet government pushed its citizens to the brink through the industrialization campaigns of the Five-Year Plans and Collectivization. This maximalization mirrored Rodchenko’s compulsion to similarly drive photographic representation to the edge of its abilities, leading the artist to question “the viability of photography in contemporary Soviet life” by the end of the 1930s (p. 1). Hence, this search for expanding the bounds of photographic capability, forcing “the medium in multiple directions and sometimes to its limits,” led Rodchenko to explore non-linear temporalities, combining the urgency of Soviet modernization projects with the acknowledgment that their outcomes were not uniform: they were located in the present, and were future-oriented, but coexisted with the reality that the changes ushered in by Soviet modernization were uneven, and that any attempt at documentary representation needed to contend with these discrepancies. Rodchenko’s aesthetic “zig-zag” style, identified by his lifelong partner Stepanova (who is a frequent feature of the text in her role as confidant, companion, and fellow artist), was in keeping with the aims of artists associated with the 1920s publications Lef and New Lef (and the latter’s emphasis on factography). This collective, if we can call it that, “thought of itself as an interventionalist group … that did not allow things to proceed according to the status quo, and that helped reroute culture not through embracing a single form but by changing methods” (p. 17). Lef affiliates did not view themselves as beholden to the Bolshevik cum Soviet government, but instead as transformative purveyors of and agitators in the propagation of the ongoing (cultural) revolution. This does not mean that Rodchenko’s general ideas about photography remained static. But Glebova, throughout her work, emphasizes the tension between Rodchenko’s theoretical writing about photography and praxis. For example, Rodchenko’s directive “Paths of Contemporary Photography,” about appropriate points of view, demonstrates how differently his visual and textual ideas were manifested in his oeuvre. In this essay, the artist condemned linear points of view (“perspectives” or “angles”) and photography “from the navel” because they undermined the purposes of the medium. “Photography, correctly applied, enacted the only transformation in perspectival systems,” Rodchenko asserted, and it had to “show the world from all points, educate the ability to see from all sides” (p. 35). This seems in keeping with the vertical, oblique, and diagonal angles present in Rodchenko’s early photographs. But as Glebova notes, the images that accompanied this essay, from Rodchenko’s Street Trade series, were largely “belly-button” shots. These images demonstrate that “from the navel” is substitutive terminology: contemporary photography is not only about avoiding these types of shots, but involved cropping, the photographer’s position, and “the relationship between the photographer (or viewer) and the subject defined more broadly, including the length of interaction and the difference in scale between the two” (ibid.). The photograph, for Rodchenko at this point in time, should splinter the totality of images. It cannot render a complete view, but only one that is disjointed by the viewer’s position vis-à-vis the subject: “and that is how photography ought to represent it, without correcting reality’s skewed, fragmented views” (ibid.). The correct photographic point of view is part and parcel of “the shift from thinking of the new, oblique, and fragmentary views as produced by the camera to viewing them as already existing, generated and framed by modes of modern living and reproduced by photography” (p. 37). Thus, photography engages in replicating what already exists, but is not the genesis of that existence, providing layered perspectives at any one given moment. This example furthers the author’s assertion that Rodchenko’s shadow oeuvre demonstrates his “grappling” with the “characteristically, typically knotty of the moment,” in which she “preserve[s] some of the jumbled, murky and mired nature of Rodchenko’s production” (p. 6). The chapters of Aleksandr Rodchenko are organized chronologically, but also thematically. The first, “Perspectives on the Collective,” investigates Rodchenko’s urban photographs, produced in the late 1920s and early 1930s, to examine the Soviet avant-garde’s overall “shifting notions of what constituted a contemporary worldview in the late 1920s, during … Stalin’s ‘revolution from above’” (p. 24). The city photographs constitute a type of world-making or -building that does not categorically abandon the past in favor of the future, but instead acknowledges the simultaneity of old and new ways of living, seeing, and participating in the socialist project: they reconsider “temporality” and the “coexisting strata of time in spatial terms,” reaching both backwards and forwards (ibid.). Glebova’s second chapter, “The Socialist Face,” turns to inconsistencies in Rodchenko’s portrait photographs. It begins with his second seminal theoretical essay, “Against the Summed-Up Portrait,” about the photographer’s moral responsibility to provide viewers “authenticity,” including embracing and collating multiple possible photographic viewpoints as well as their plurality. It was only through “proliferation … that [photography] had the potential to document contemporaneity.” Furthermore, through acknowledging the pluralistic truth provided by an archive of images, the photographer could provide “authenticity” and “convey” their subject in all its “indexical multitude” (p. 66). Yet Rodchenko’s own portraits failed to adhere to his dictates in “Against the Summed-Up Portrait,” further representing the relational limitations between his writing and images: the essay “articulates the tensions within Rodchenko’s oeuvre and points to the very real difficulties of attempting to represent a distinctly contemporary subjectivity though photography” (pp. 66–67). Here, Glebova focuses primarily on the Pioneer series as a sample confirming Rodchenko’s assertion that fragmented or partial views of the subject could not produce “one sum total,” but that this concept, and resultant Pioneer portraits, neglected “to correspond to the face of the new Soviet citizen as set forth in cultural policy.”4 Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Rodchenko’s time in Karelia and his work documenting the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal. The former looks at the artist’s photographs as a means of how he experienced landscape and place, “a counterpoint to the transformative vision of the state” and his earlier, largely urban-based work (p. 106). Rodchenko undermines the Soviet industrial vision in his Vakhtan photographs, displaying the disjuncture between new construction and those assembling this transformation of the landscape: the worker’s clothing demonstrates the “chasm of history and class difference that borders on unbridgeable,” a signifier of the “illusion of industrial advancement” (p. 116). But his close-ups of materials at the Vakhtan building site also present “raw materials as vast structures, thus magically conquering” the hiccups and hardships that accompanied the project, a simultaneous before and after, through providing order to untamed nature. The subsequent chapter, “Engineered Chaos,” contends with Rodchenko’s photomontages for the journal USSR in Construction, a technique he used as “a tool for imagining and creating new worlds” (p. 138). The colossal undertaking of the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal could not be captured without Rodchenko’s displacement and reordering of subjects and visual images through the montage process: vacillating back and forth between the terrible means by which the canal was built (forced labor, violence, inadequate tools) and the monumentality of propagating the completed project, which, due to the nature of the canal’s construction, proved to be largely useless. In the case of both chapters, the author shows how Rodchenko’s concepts of “authenticity” and fragmentation are compromised by attempting to apply order to natural and industrial anarchy. The final chapter, “The Photographer’s Hand,” returns to the artist’s photographic eclecticism in the mid-to-late 1930s, to bring “together two poles of Rodchenko’s practice … one determinedly singular and mostly studio-bound (the overpainted photograph) and the other collaborative, public-facing, and mass-(re)produced (the illustrated books and journals)” (p. 168). At this stage in his career, the artist moved even further from his theoretical commitment to “authenticity” and earlier principles, “against the documentary, the serial, the dynamic and the unposed, and toward the insistently staged or openly performative, the singular the haptic and the monumental” (p. 169). The simultaneous production of hand-painted and totalizing photographs is evidence of Rodchenko’s move away from “representing, reflecting, and instantiating everyday, contemporary life” (ibid.). This shift in his practice proceeded in seemingly opposite directions: the unique and idiosyncratic hand-colored images and the eminently reproducible mass-published photographs. Rodchenko’s shift to monumental representation occurred shortly before he moved away from photography as his primary medium of creativity, pointing to his conclusion that the documentary powers of photography, which he so vehemently defended a decade earlier, were simply “untenable” by the time he and Stepanova were forced to deface their own work for political reasons in the late 1930s (p. 204). Both Photographing Central Asia and Aleksandr Rodchenko reposition the study of photography, whether through highlighting the importance of Central Asian photography in global histories, or the reworking of a well-known artist’s more obscure or “shadow” oeuvre. My emphasis on the co-temporality and contemporaneity of photography in these two texts, aided by Glebova’s illumination of said concepts, explains how they can be thematically connected in a way that is meaningful for scholars interested in photographs as historical documents. Studying temporality is hardly a new concept in relation to photographic theory and works, and several academic studies, largely (though not exclusively) from the mid-2000s onward, have explored the photograph and its propensity for dislocating space and time across a wide range of social scientific disciplines, including art history and archeology, from media studies to visual anthropology, to name a few.5 But the wealth of photographic materials from the late Imperial and Soviet periods, from the unpublished or lesser-known photographs by famous artists like Rodchenko, or the photo objects of the more peripheral regions of both empires, surely necessitate a more extensive investigation of the temporal plurality of photographs rather than simply their relationship to modernity, however defined. Modernity as an underlying feature of photography, both as a technology and as a means of documenting modernization in the late Imperial and early Soviet periods, is no longer a particularly useful evaluative feature for photographic research: first, because it is conceptually so broad that it defies meaning, and second, because notions of modernity shifted rapidly from the late 1800s to the Soviet 1930s. “Modernity,” both volumes make clear, similarly cannot contend with the uneven process of Imperial and Soviet development. Both Photographing Central Asia and Aleksandr Rodchenko demonstrate that photographs engage with contemporaneity, the “here and now” in which they were created, whether for artistic or scientific purposes. But both also demonstrate how photographs juggle temporalities that stretch both backward and forward, broadening our understanding of the multifarious meanings associated with the medium. Jessica Werneke is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Iowa. Her research investigates how the unique political and cultural context of the “Thaw” provided photojournalists and amateur photographers the opportunity to renew classic discourses about photography’s artistic, aesthetic, and documentary properties. Her current projects focus on interpretations of Soviet photography theory and amateur photography clubs in the late Soviet period. Her other research interests include Soviet amateur culture and gender and sexuality in modern Russian visual culture.