Demonstration

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.

1930

Among the founders of the October photo group

Rodchenko is one of the organisers of the October photography group; critics would soon brand the group he led the centre of “petty-bourgeois aestheticism” in photography. By other accounts, he had joined the group as early as 1928.

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.

1932

Leaves October, becomes an Izogiz photo-correspondent

Rodchenko leaves the October group, becomes Izogiz's Moscow photo-correspondent and joins MOSKh, the Moscow artists' union. Under pressure he had to give up photography, returning two years later once all groups were dissolved and Socialist Realism was declared the single method.

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.

December 1933

Designs an issue of “USSR in Construction” with his photos

Rodchenko designs issue 12 of the magazine USSR in Construction, illustrated entirely with his own photographs. He was also the designer and photographer of the writers' monograph “The White Sea–Baltic Canal Named after Stalin”, and with Stepanova designed photo albums such as “15 Years of Kazakhstan”, “The First Cavalry”, “The Red Army” and “Soviet Aviation”.