Radical photographic style was combined with cutting-edge graphics, in a magazine called ‘USSR in Construction’, designed by Rodchenko, it was a showcase of political propaganda glorifying the achievements of the Soviet system.

“So this is the famous parachute. And this is a bit of what’s really fantastic. Yeah, so then you have this amazing foldout, origami style. This, the bottom, of course, what we’re gonna find is a different Stalin, of course. This is not a deluxe edition, this, this is an ordinary edition, because in the deluxe one, this is physically a cloth or paper parachute that sticks out, even more dramatic than this, but still pretty good.”

USSR in Construction displays Rodchenko’s mastery of photomontage, a graphic technique that took its cue from cinema montage. Rodchenko’s photomontages treated photographs as raw footage, suppressing their individuality, collectivizing their energies, cutting, pasting, retouching and re-photographing them to conjure up dizzying visions of the future.

But photomontage also shows up photographs for what they really are---mute documents whose meaning remains fluid.

“There is in photography something quite radically open in terms of the meaning of an image. Meaning is something that usually needs to be pinned down from outside. This is why photography has grown up with the caption, this is why it’s grown up with photojournalism. Photography can serve, can be put at the disposal of a set of ideas, a political ideology. Its character as a functional record can be harnessed in one way or another.”

Rodchenko harnessed photography to greatest effect in an issue of USSR in Construction devoted to the White Sea Canal, trumpeted at home and abroad as a triumph of Soviet engineering and enlightened Soviet penal policies. The canal would be built by criminals and other social undesirables who would be rehabilitated through labor. Rodchenko traveled to the canal to take the photographs that would provide the raw material for this masterpiece of political propaganda.

Vocabulary:

parachute: A parachute is a device which enables a person to jump from an aircraft and float safely to

                 the ground. It consists of a large piece of thin cloth attached to your body by strings.

                 降落伞

deluxe: of better quality and more expensive than other things of the same type

            The deluxe model costs a lot more.

photomontage: 集锦照相, 蒙太奇照片

conjure up: to bring a thought, picture, idea, or memory to someone's mind

                   When he closed his eyes, he could conjure up in exact color almost every

                event of his life.

pin down: If you try to pin something down, you try to discover exactly what, where, or when it is.

                 If we cannot pin down exactly what we are supposed to be managing, how

              can we manage it?

rehabilitate: to help someone to live a healthy, useful, or active life again after they have been seriously ill or in prison

                    a special unit for rehabilitating stroke patients