“So if we look at this picture, we can see here, in the Rodchenko book, how the original looked, rather grey and flat across here, the montage, all together much more successful as a picture, he`s able to put in the text, give much more impact for this crowd of workers, and of course this gets more impact, in the way that he`s given the contrast, really heightened-up contrast between here and the backdrop. You can see all these different components have been put together to make the picture, and although when you look at this you wouldn’t think it’s a particular montage, it's only when you see the original, and you see the, how it`s changed in its intention and its meaning, then you really understand how photomontage this is.”

But Rodchenko's virtuoso postproduction conceals a grim truth, these determined looking workers were mostly political prisoners. And the White Sea Canal, a 140 mile-long gulag, and far from being rehabilitated through their labor, 200,000 of them would die as a result of it. A reality that can still be glimpsed in the unsmiling faces, the untouched original.

It's not clear how much Rodchenko knew about the realities of the White Sea Canal, but a snapshot of his daughter Varvara, taken around this time, suggests he knew all about the ambiguities of a camera's all seeing eye.

“She is shot from above, and so she is looking up, covering her eyes, squinting up at the sun, and then looming above her is the dark shadow of her farther, Rodchenko with the camera. And yet all we see of him is this black shadow that’s indistinct, so there`s both the mastery of vision and blindness and the same thing with the little girl, that she’s covering one eye as if she can't see, and yet she is being seen in such (a) total clarity in the sunlight, and it just seems to be about the camera itself as this possibility of blindness and insight of amplified human vision and always the inability to see.”

While Rodchenko struggled to photograph a new society, in Paris, another photographer was attempting to preserve one about to disappear, Eugene Atget had spent 30 years documenting the city's ancient core, from backstreet to shopfront before it was swept away by redevelopment.

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