“The elusive lends itself towards the surrealists and the factuality lends itself towards those who are, you know, deeply connected to all the minutia of life.”

The world's least likely surrealist died a few months after his discovery. By then, his documents had been appropriated by Europe's avant-garde. In 1929, they were shown alongside works by Man Ray and others at the influential film and photo show held in Stuttgart.

“29 was a phenomenal year for photography, it had the famous film and photo exhibition, just show you the catalogue full. So it's really likely to find in moment, the statement, really about where photography had gone. Well, this is Bayard, Man Ray from Paris, Hannah Hoch, Edward Weston, Atget, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Piet Zwart the designer, and in fact, even the British Cecil Beaton gets a look in. Interestingly, we are virtually excluded, as Britain was quite asleep during the 20s, if you like, photographically. The action was in Germany and Russia.”

But in Russia and Germany, the action was about to take a sinister turn. Stalin's Great Terror, unleashed in 1934, had created a legion of the damned. Heroes of the Soviet Union now declared enemies of the people. First, they were liquidated, then removed from history. Propaganda publications had to be kept up to date as arrest, followed arrest. Alexander Rodchenko, the master of montage, who could turn gulag slaves into rehabilitated workers, was now forced to doctor books that he himself had created, using black ink to turn apparatchiks into un-people.

“These were the photographs that Rodchenko’d been commissioned to make and the book that he had been commissioned to make, and that he had been forced, either actively or passively, to destroy. That becomes a diary of repainting, of obliteration, of destroying or what by, by adding to it. The interesting thing is that do you naturally concentrate on the kind of face area? But then actually if you look at the kind of shoulders in the position of the body, the un-obliterated area which is the clothes and the shoulders and parts of the body, then they still seem to proclaim the human being underneath the obliteration.”

Vocabulary:

lend itself toward: (=lend itself to) To give a chance for or be useful for; to be possible or right for

All of these will lend itself toward a renewed focus on content, which is a very exciting thing for me as a big step toward the high-definition three-dimensional canvas which I originally envisioned with the ORB.

minutia: a minute or minor detail ― usually used in plural

Peter has noted that there are emotional and cultural universals that stretch across ethnicities, across national borders, with differences only in the minutia.

apparatchik: an official who works for a government or other organization and who obeys orders without thinking