DREAMS DECREED.

Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US

The Corcoran Gallery of Art 

Washington, D.C.

July 3-October 3,1999

International Center of Photography

New York, New York

October 20, 1999-February 13, 2000

Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US

By Leah Bendavid-Val

Zurich and New York: Edition Stemmle, 1999

223 pp./$55.00 (sb)

It is always a little dicey to throw around the word propaganda. One person's propaganda, of course, may be another's passionate expression. When does an artist cross that line? Is it determined simply by choice of subject matter (telling one story and not another), or when a photograph is demonstrably staged, providing a distorted picture of the world around us? And, perhaps more pointed a question, can an artist create propaganda without intending to?

"Propaganda and Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US" raises these questions even as it relies on a much more self evident definition of propaganda--namely that the American and Soviet photographers on display here were paid by their respective governments during the 1930s and directed by national photography bureaus with creative leaders who approved assignments, and, at times, even directed the cropping of photographs. But what were these two very different governments getting for their patronage?

Certainly, it is not immediately clear how showing poverty and racism--as many of the American photographs do--would be exactly what a government official would order. And even the Soviet photographs, which were intended to depict an improving economy, leave the viewer unsettled, with so much left unsaid. I prefer to think that "propaganda" is a clumsy word created to capture, or merely rationalize, the power of art, especially political art. Perhaps the exhibit was trying to make this point with the second half of its title. After all, are not dreams really at the heart of politics and "propaganda"?

Still, it seems odd to pair these two concepts--the American dream and the Soviet dream--as the exhibit does, particularly in its first displays. As an American, I can attest to the resonance of that first expression--whether it means having a home on the range, or with a view of Central Park or with a white picket fence, and the life of a movie star, a millionaire or a great novelist. The American Dream is a personal pursuit; the Soviet Dream by contrast is more closely tied to the community. This view of success as sacrifice for the group, curator Leah Bendavid-Val argues in the catalog essay, runs deep throughout Russian history, preceding the arrival of Marxist-Leninism and the 1917 Revolution. As different as our respective systems and histories may be, it is the disparity of our dreams that explains the divergent paths of our state-sponsored photographies.

The American dream, as introduced by harshly realistic photographs, had been shattered by the Depression. Even so, those shattered lives are granted an American's due--an individual depth and sorrow--by the artists sent out to record them. Dorothea Lange, whose work dominates this exhibit, is most exemplary of this American form of "propaganda" and her harrowingly personal photographs often focus on the eyes as a window to the soul. In Ditched, stalled, and stranded couple inside car, San Joaquin, California, taken on assignment in 1935, the man at the wheel wears a vacant, broken-down look--eyes straight ahead, centered in the photograph yet also gazing off into the distance since Lange is shooting from a low angle. These are America's unsteady circumstances embodied by a hard, vacant, stare.

Likewise, her famous photograph Migrant Mother (1936), of an Oakie mother with her children, has those same centered eyes, still with a vacant look. This photograph is rightly considered emblematic by Bendavid-Val. It is an example of a favored subject--the suffering of the masses leaving the nation's dried-up farms--and the most common way the government funded this photographic agency, first established in 1935 as part of the Resettlement Agency (RA) and then renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, with its artistically progressive "History Section" director, Roy Emerson Stryker. As his title indicates, Stryker sent his photographers out to accurately record the world that was being lost during the Dust Bowl years but if there was any additional intent, it was to demonstrate the need for government programs to help the country's ailing farmers. But again, wouldn't crude notions of propaganda focus on happily relocated people rather than the miserable pre-relocated, as the bulk of these phot ographs do?

Sixty years later, the U.S. government has seized upon Lange's photograph for its propagandistic meaning. It was picked for a U.S. Postal Service series to represent the '30s, and its caption, as found on the Postal Service's official Web site, reads: "Dorothea Lange's 1936 photograph of Native American Florence Owens Thompson symbolizes the courage of Americans as they tried to survive the hard times of the Great Depression." Suddenly, the subject is a Native American, and her evident despair is a sign of courage, not resignation. In some ways, propaganda was so much simpler in the 1930s, when the individual was so central, and her larger significance was as ambiguous as the times. If the faces in Lange's photographs hide more than they expose, the rare cases when the eyes of Lange's subjects are truly unseen--as in her famous White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California (1932), of a poor man cradling his tin cup among a destitute crowd, or in One of Chris Adolf's younger children, FSA rehabilitation cl ients, near Wapoto, Yakima Valley, Washington (1939) showing a girl leaning against a barbed wire fence--the effect is even more poignant.

By considering Lange in the company of her contemporaries the power of her portraits is made even more evident. Arthur Rothstein, the first photographer of the RA, has an incredibly Lange-like photograph in the exhibition, The family of migrating fruit workers from Tennessee now camped in a field near the packing house at Winterhaven, Florida (1937), that dissipates the tension that Lange always cultivated. It is hard to identify exactly what minimizes the power of Rothstein's print. It could be that the entire clan (five children) are not fully enlisted in the project, so a bit of self-consciousness is evident, or it could be that the mother is too far away and too off-center for her worn face to dominate a viewer's reaction, or maybe that Rothstein uses a car window as a gimmick to create a picture within a picture. So what's left is a floating family portrait that hardly summons up outrage or sympathy. There is an uneasiness about the power that Lange can command, and perhaps that is what prompts the use of the term "propaganda."

Luckily, the other American photographers in the exhibition work with different tools than Lange or Rothstein. The Americans, unlike the Soviets, were allowed an irreverence toward their history and could employ humor and irony. One powerful factor is the persistent optimism of America's advertising that deepens the shadows of its photographs. Marion Post Wolcott's haunting silhouette of a black man skulking up the steps to a movie theater's "colored adm." in sunny Belzoni, Mississippi, for example, is somehow politicized by the large advertisement above him reading "Dr. Pepper good for life!" Likewise, Gordon Parks can famously reference "American Gothic" in his 1942 portrait of Ella Watson, US government charwoman, Washington, DC, where the title's mock grandiosity comments on a time when even the armed forces were segregated.

Only Russell Lee conveys a sense of joy and wonderment in his photographs. One imagines Lee reveling in his assignment to wander the countryside looking for pictures. While Jack Delano's picture of a movie theater dwells on the projectionist's awkward silence, Lee shows an excited crowd helping to move a piano in anticipation of a Cajun band contest at the National Rice Festival in Crowley, Louisiana and the thrill of a loving couple on a twirling carnival ride. While such rosy pictures make Lee the most effective government "propagandist" -- and Bendavid-Val notes that he did stay with the FSA until the formal end of the program in 1942--they do relieve the steady seriousness of the artists.

The Russian photographers had much less room to maneuver on subject matter as "incorrect" artists were put on trial (or worse) for their missteps. Denied the ability to comment directly on their subject, the Soviet photographers, much more than the American ones, retreated into aesthetic considerations. So, under the sway of the Oktober movement and one of its founders, Alexander Rodchenko, photographers used graphic design techniques, often tilting their cameras or altering their compositions. By government edict, however, this movement was quickly ended and unmanipulated realism was favored.

On April 23, 1932 the Communist Party's "Decree on the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations" called for a documentary style in shooting. As Bendavid-Val convincingly argues, since many of the "forbidden," experimental methods of that decree were nonetheless incorporated in approved photography or graphic design, what seems more notable about such a decree is its explicit attempt to politicize art-to insist that an artist could be tried for the crime of incorrect art.

Photographer Elizar Langman's prosecution is mentioned in the catalog but never alluded to in the show. His trial, a month after the edict, for, among other things, using "a formalist method," and neglecting to clear his visit to the Krammashstroy industrial complex with the proper authorities led to public censure and other disciplinary measures. More notably, it was used to consolidate control over the process. (One of the rulings of Langman's court was that photojournalists were mandated to turn in their negatives to administrators to avoid their private or commercial use.) Langman's biography in the catalog is opaque--he apparently died of an unspecified cause in 1939, an ominous year in European history to be sure. The four Langman photographs included in the show, all from 1930, tend to be carefully conceived--not only at an angle but crammed with movement and subject matter so as to play with depth of field--but certainly not lacking uplifting subject matter (as in Workers writing). Yet not every chil d shown is clean, and men are shown Fighting for bread. But it is futile to look for controversial material in these photographs that could possibly make sense today.

The Commissar Vanishes (1997) by David King documents the attention the Stalin Government gave to photography. Legions of retouchers removed wrinkles from the Great Leader's face and excised the images of discredited officials from photographs of historically important events. King tells how the talented Rodchenko, himself questioned as a photographer but relied upon for his design skills, had to clean up his picture book Ten Years in Uzbekistan (1934). "Rodchenko's response in brush and ink came close to creating a new art form, a graphic reflection of the real fate of victims, for example, the notorious secret police torturer Yakov Peters had suffered an ethereal Rothko-like extinction. The face of party functionary Akmal Ikramov, veiled in ink, had become a terrifying apparition." [1]

While the stakes were greater among party politicians, Lazar Mezreicher, a key photography editor and theorist and presumably one of Langman's accusers, was himself purged for being a Trotzkyite by the decade's end. Before then, Mezreicher, a former manager of the Foreign Department of the enormous SoyuzFoto photo agency, had been an innovative propagandist focused on the Soviet Union's reputation abroad. He conceived of "serial photography" to narrate a story. One of his celebrated projects was a staged portrayal of "Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of the Filippov Family." That story, the work of three Soviet photographers, appeared in the communist German paper Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung in 1931 whose style was later adopted in the U.S., most notably by Stryker and Life magazine.

Langman's sins are hardly self-evident, but they do materialize in contrast to those who hewed closer to the official teachings, such as Mark Markov-Grinberg. (Apparently he added Markov to his name to make it seem less Jewish and in the Government-produced book Soviet Photography (1939), he is identified as M. Markov.) His photographs, such as Nikita lzotov, Distinguished Miner of Donbass (1934), are truly heroic in a shockingly uncritical way. Happy Maternity, Stavropol Territory (1935) lacks any complexity or artistic intent that could detract from its statement on peasant life.

In fact, it is only by consulting a book such as Soviet Photography that one can see how Bendavid-Val has struggled to select stimulating, complicated work. Her "propaganda," by contrast, includes few portraits of great leaders--an obvious staple of government work--and lacks saccharine work like Gregory Zelma's It's a Secret, (c. 1939) which shows two children conspiring in Norman Rockwell-like innocence. The renegade Langman has one work in the 1939 book, and it is tourist shot of the Soviet coast.

Still, there is a parallel between the work in Soviet Photography and the work Bendavid-Val selected. As she puts it, "the Soviets photographed progress." So in the Soviet half of "Propaganda and Dreams" there are paeans to new industrial machinery and new agricultural equipment, celebrations of the physically invigorated young men and women and a hardy welcome for those on the edges of the empire. Occasionally these themes run together as when we see a young soldier demonstrating the working of a phonograph to Asiatic Soviet people, or in Dmitri Debabov's Concert in Chukotka (1936) which depicts the performance of an oratorio accompanied with strings in a field with an Eskimo mother in a skin jacket with her child. But while such a photograph taken by an American photographer would have demanded some judgment from the viewer about the arrogance of such a project--and one would dwell on the Eskimo woman's eyes looking off in distraction--it is hard to know whether in those heady times this photograph failed to embody the Soviet intention of uplifting the people.

Perhaps nothing captures an American's inability to think through the meaning of the Soviet photographs like Viktor Bulla's Pioneers in Defense Drill, Leningrad (1937), the most profoundly unsettling photograph in the exhibit. Bulla's photograph of hundreds of children wearing gas masks was not meant to be ghoulish, a commentary on war or lost innocence, but rather exemplified a reason for pride--the country was blessed with well-trained, well-equipped and obviously courageous young fighters. Likewise, Markov-Grinberg's 1933 Public Letter to a slacker from record-breaking collective farmers, Stalingrad Region with the prongs of a pitchfork menacingly popping up from behind, might have inspired the populace, rather than showing the dangers of collective action.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the term "propaganda" for the photographs in this exhibit, especially for this time when mobile hand-held cameras were relatively new, is how time and history can distort its meaning. Ozymandias's propagandistic boast is Percy Bysshe Shelley's evidence of human folly. Likewise, once-uplifting Soviet photography now carries implicit warnings about groupthink and militarism and American work has a two-dimensionality that resolves little and only demands more questions about that period. As events proved more complex, the U.S.'s experiment with propaganda came to an end. Lange helped speed its decline when she was sent to chronicle one of America's darkest chapters--the internment of Japanese-Americans in California during World War II--and was often censored by officials who had qualms about the policy, endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

NOAM COHEN is a writer who lives in New York City.

NOTES

(1.) David King, The Commissar Vanishes: the falsification of photographs and art in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997), p. 10.