Alexander Rodchenko was a Russian painter, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He changed form painting to photography when he saw painting as “dead”. He took advantage of the flexibility of the Leica camera. Photographs could be taken from any angle, instead of the usual “belly button photography”, where photos were all taken from the same level (belly button level).
Even though he changed to photography, he combined his photography skills with his abilities in graphic design to produce photo-montages. A photo-montage is a graphic technique, taken from cinema montage. They are created by collecting, cutting, pasting, editing and re-photographing images to create a new, unique photograph.
A lot of the work Rodchenko's photo-montages were created for “USSR in construction”, a propaganda magazine he designed, glorifying the Soviet system showed their successes. It was devoted to the White Sea Canal, which was built be criminals and rehabilitated through labour. It was here that he got many of his raw images, ready to cut up and use for his photo-montages. However, these criminals were in fact political prisoners, and 200 000 of them died during the building of the canal.
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