Vladimir Mayakovsky

1920–1930

Professor at VKhUTEMAS/VKhUTEIN

For ten years Rodchenko teaches in the woodworking and metalworking faculties (merged into the Dermetfak in 1928), training students to design multifunctional objects for everyday life and public buildings, expressive through construction rather than ornament.

1922

Works with Dziga Vertov

Rodchenko works intensively with the filmmaker Dziga Vertov, whose ideas and practice deeply influenced him.

1924

Takes up photography

From 1924 Rodchenko takes his own photographs, becoming famous for his experiments with angles and viewpoints. His credo: “I want to teach people to see extraordinarily ordinary things.”

1931

October group show at the House of the Press, and a backlash

At the October group's exhibition at the House of the Press in Moscow, Rodchenko shows “Pioneer Girl”, “Pioneer with a Trumpet” and the series “Vakhtan Sawmill”; the pictures draw devastating criticism and charges of formalism and of refusing to adapt to the tasks of “proletarian photography”. By some accounts, he is expelled from the group in 1931.

early 1933

Secret assignment to the White Sea Canal

On OGPU orders Rodchenko is to photograph the completion and opening of the canal for propaganda and to set up photo laboratories in the Gulag; with the canal's management he greets the steamer “Karl Marx” carrying writers led by Maxim Gorky. By his own account he took over two thousand photographs there — no more than thirty are known today.

1935

Masters of Soviet Art exhibition and a public recantation

Rodchenko is allowed to take part in the Masters of Soviet Art exhibition only on condition that he publicly denounce his earlier formalist work; the self-denunciation is printed in Sovetskoe Foto. Other accounts date his participation in the “Exhibition of Masters of Soviet Photographic Art” to 1936.