Aleksandr Rodcenko, At the Petrol Station, Vintage Silver Salt Photograph

At the petrol station is an original vintage silver salts photograph, made by the great Russian Constructivist artist Aleksandr Michajlovic Rodčenko (Saint Petersburg, 1891 - Moscow, 1956) in 1935 ca. Printed later, presumably between the 1940s and the 1950s. In very good conditions, it is rare and precious. A scene of ordinary life is portrayed in an unusual point of view. The oblique cuts, the use of diagonal as the dynamics of this image, the close position of the machine are constants of Rodčenko'style and something of absolutely revolutionary and innovative at that time in the field of photography! Provenance: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Great Britain; Forum Auction, London; Private Collection. Bibliography: Alexander Rodchenko. Catalog of the retrospective exhibition published from the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1979. Aleksandr Michajlovič Rodčenko (St. Petersburg, 1891 - Moscow, 1956) Aleksandr Michajlovič Rodčenko was a Russian painter, photographer and graphic designer, a leading figure of the Russian avant-gardes who collaborated in the establishment of the Constructivist movement. In 1924 Rodcenko definitively abandoned painting as the main artistic medium to embrace photography; in the same year he made a manifesto passed into history, and created a campaign against illiteracy with the photomontage technique for the Lengiz , in which Lilja Jur'evna Brik shouts: "Books for all fields of knowledge". His first photos are illustrations of the poem by Mayakovsky Pro Eto. In 1928 he bought the historic camera, the Leica, with which he captured images of unusual and bold perspectives of balconies, stairs, windows and walls, precisely as a sign of rupture with respect to conventional photography of the period. Experimenting with oblique cuts, using the diagonal as the dynamics of the images, the close position of the machine, and unusual shots, he isolates and emphasizes shapes and simple graphic elements such as lines, circles, curves, as his compatriot Kazimir Malevich was doing in painting. Rodcenko's photographic career lasts only about 16 years, from 1924 to 1940, a time in which, however, he revolutionized the concept of photography. "If you want to teach the human eye to see in a new way, you need to show it everyday and familiar objects from totally unexpected perspectives and angles and in unexpected situations; new objects should be photographed from different angles to offer a complete representation of the object ", writes Rodcenko in 1928. He combines theory with practice, and in 1926 he writes articles on photography and cinema for Sovetskoe Kino (Soviet Cinema) magazine. In 1927 he obtained his first photographic exhibition, which was followed by many others at home and abroad. Called too Western and too "formalist", Rodcenko was ordered to portray only state events (in 1933): Stalinism ruled and it was necessary to "obey" the aesthetics of the state. Rodcenko was not in line with the ideals of the regime. He worked with his partner Stepanova until 1940, when he abandoned photography in favor of painting.