on cocoleilei
So if you look at this picture, we can see here, the Rodchenko's book, have the original look, and the green flat across here, the montage, all together much more successful as a picture, he is over putting in the text, give much more impact for these crowd of workers, and of course this get more impact, in the way of these given the contrast, really heighten up contrast between here and backdrop.
You can see all these different components we've been put together to make the picture, and although when you look this you wouldn’t think it’s particular montage, it's only when you see the original, and you see the how it is changed, and its intention and its meaning, that you really understand how photo montage exists.
But Rodchenko's virtuoso post production conceals a grim truth, these determined looking workers were mostly political prisoners, and White Sea canal,140 mile long gulag,and far from being rehabilitated to the labor,200,000 of them would die as 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 White Sea canal, but it’s snapshot of his daughter Vevera, take at around this time, suggests he knew all about the ambiguities of camera's all seeing eyes.
She is shot from above, and so she's 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 in this distinct, so there is both the mastery of vision and blindness and same thing with the little girl, that she’s covering one eye, that she can't see, and yet she is being seen in such a total clearance 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,*has spent 30 years documenting the city's ancient core ,from backstreet to shop front before it was swept away by redevelopment.