The Russian Revolution and photography: The tragic paradoxes of canonisation

Abstract

Bourdieu (et al.’s) Photography contends that it is the fate of photography to remain for ever ‘a middlebrow art’. This is partly because its technological character is held to be inimical to canonisation as a high art-form, but also because it lacks a class willing to invest time in its reception. Here, I argue, Bourdieu has been proved wrong: photography has now been consecrated, including, ironically, his own photography. Support for this claim is drawn from the field of art in Russia. The Russian Revolution and the Constructivist movement brought into the public gaze artists such as Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and Valentina Kulagina, who saw photography as one of a series of genres that might renovate the social order and transforms the public’s habitual perception. Photography became central in the movement to replace Academic art and thus a key route to photography’s consecration. However, as Benjamin pointed out there is a danger of decontextualising and ‘eternalising’ the photographs or photomontages that make the transition into the art museum. They may remain neither the art of the community from which they emerged, nor be recognised as an expressive resource for later dominated groups; instead such canonised works may become a status adornment of those with cultural capital.

Introduction

When the February Revolution occurred in France in 1848, one vital question raised was ‘Delacroix, why were you not there!’ (cited in Clark, 1982, p. 126). The reference was to Delacroix’s painting of Liberty Leading the People, 28 July (1830), which had famously acted as a political weapon in support of the revolutionaries, in the July of that year.

When the October Revolution occurred in Russia in 1917, it had been preceded in both Russia itself and Italy by Cubo-Futurism, championing ‘the modern’: metropolitan social rhythms, industrial technology and homogeneous, clock-based time. The Russian artistic avant-garde was already making its mark by 1912. In 1917, its members actively endorsed the progression from the Kerensky-led bourgeois revolution to the wider, anti-capitalist revolution. Within the field of the visual arts, the avant-garde expressed its support for a more radical social transformation through two interlinked movements – Suprematism and Constructivism. It was especially amongst the Constructivists that there appeared a new photographic form, including photomontage, associated with Alexander Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, El Lissitsky, Varvara Stepanova, Vladimir Tatlin and the Stenberg brothers, amongst others. This in turn gave birth to a largely-forgotten Workers’ Photography Movement in the 1920s and 1930s, not just in the USSR but also on an international basis. At the risk of substituting individuals for a whole movement, we might say that Rodchenko, in particular, was the Russian Revolution’s Delacroix. . .

Bourdieu and photography

I want, first, however, to turn to Pierre Bourdieu. In 1965, Bourdieu and his wife, Marie-Claire, wrote an illuminating article, ‘The Peasant and Photography’. He also published, in collaboration with his colleagues, a book of essays on photography: Un Art Moyen (translated into English as Photography, a Middlebrow Art [1990]). In Un Art Moyen he argued that not only was photography unconsecrated (or uncanonised) as an artistic genre but it would never be consecrated. The reason? Photography lacked a social class that enthusiastically consumed it – in other words, one that might act as its bearers as an art-form. Now, I am in general an admirer of Bourdieu’s sociology. However, in this article, I want to take issue with him on the consecration of photography. I shall do so in light of the extraordinary cultural inheritance bestowed by the Russian Revolution, even if many hopes for Soviet society were to be dashed decisively by the mid-1920s.

Bourdieu, reflected in 1965, that through photography ‘The Portrait Gallery has been democratized’; portraiture, as an art-form, had once been undertaken only by an elite at considerable cost (Bourdieu et al., 1990, p. 30). Yet for him and his colleagues, photography would never achieve recognition as a major art, due to the inequalities of cultural distribution. Thus, on the one hand, although education opens up the arts to the haute bourgeoisie, the perceived technological character of photography has relegated it to a purely domestic, family use. For them, greater symbolic capital or ‘distinction’ has been derived from the more securely ‘consecrated’ or canonised forms – opera, literature and the older visual arts – for which they feel a profound affinity, rooted in the body. They defend their relative neglect of the newer art in terms of a proclaimed ‘lack of time’ to learn to enjoy innovative or experimental photographic practices (p. 65).

The working class and peasantry, on the other hand, use photography to reaffirm social solidarity. For example, the photograph that best commemorates a peasant couple’s honeymoon is the one with a background of one of the most revered cityscapes, such as the Eiffel Tower, thus conforming to expectations (p. 36).

Thus to commemorate family and collective festivals, peasants are obliged to spend much-needed money in employing professional photographers (Bourdieu & Bourdieu, 1965, pp. 165–166). They compose themselves in the conventional frontal pose, as in the most archetypal formal wedding photograph (p. 173; Bourdieu et al., 1990, pp. 82–83). This has social consequences that are exactly the opposite of the Russian avant-gardists’ hope for photography: ‘Popular photography’:

. . . eliminates the accidental or the aspect which, as in a fugitive image, dissolves the real by temporalizing it. . . . [P]hotography ‘taken in the moment’ – the expression of a worldview born in the 14^th Century with perspective – makes an instantaneous cut in the visible world and, in petrifying the human gesture, immobilises a unique state of the reciprocal relation of things, arrest[ing] the gaze on an imperceptible moment of a never-achieved trajectory. . . . Thus in spontaneously adopting the ordained order and postures of Byzantine mosaics, peasants who take up a pose for a marriage photograph seem to wish to escape the de-realising, that is, temporalizing, power of photography. (Bourdieu & Bourdieu, 1965, pp. 173–174; my translation and italics; ¹ see also Bourdieu et al., 1990, p. 76)

A small minority of the skilled working class or petty-bourgeoisie fights free of this tyranny of social obligations and ‘lukewarm’ practice. They do make use of the camera for different, purely aesthetic, functions, particularly in the case of those lower-managerial or white-collar workers who attend camera clubs (Bourdieu et al., 1990, p. 45). But these are often isolated, single, unsociable figures: in terms of Durkheim’s concepts, they are ‘egoistic or anomic’ (pp. 41, 98). However, even this group tends not to use photography for avant-garde ends: partly because they feel that the camera’s distinctively mechanical character disqualifies it from producing ‘great art’, partly because they would rather seek to replicate, through photographs, the more accessible genres of consecrated forms, such as landscapes in oils. To use Bourdieu’s terms, they take:

. . . the world as he or she sees it, i.e. according to the logic of a vision of the world which borrows its categories and its canons from the art of the past. (p. 75)

Hence Bourdieu’s tragic view. He acknowledges that a photograph taken from an unusual vantage point – thus using perspective as a ‘hallucinatory technique’ – may break with taken-for-granted doxa or the ‘cocoon of habit’. Indeed, he cites Proust to reinforce this point (pp. 74–75), whilst also drawing on Benjamin to claim that photographs with ‘these powers to disconcert’ are exceptional. For, making an

. . . instant incision into the visible world, photography provides the means of dissolving the solid and compact reality of everyday perception into an infinity of fleeting profiles like dream images, in order to capture absolutely unique moments of the reciprocal situation of things, to grasp, as Walter Benjamin has shown, aspects, imperceptible because they are instantaneous, of the perceived world. (p. 76)

But ‘normal photography’, that undertaken by the vast bulk of the population, Bourdieu insists, does not deploy this realist power to disconcert its viewers. For these reasons, photography is doomed to be ‘a minor art’ (p. 60). In principle it might be consecrated, but in the logic of a wider practice it is destined to remain merely a potentially ‘legitimizable’ art-form (p. 96). I shall come back to this.

Russian revolution in art

I want to return to the Russian revolution in art and its impact on the social revolution of October 1917. The bulk of academic work in English on this area has been aimed at understanding and assessing the outstanding individuals within Russian modernism who were important in pioneering new forms of cultural production (see, for example, Clark, 1999; Fitzpatrick, 1971/2002, 1978; Gray, 1962/1971).

However, it took an enormous collective effort beyond these iconic figures to critique the ‘academic eye’, especially the academic eye trained in the main centre for professional formation: the Czarist Academy of Arts at St Petersburg. Indeed, founded in 1757 as a ‘total institution’ for its students (Goffman, 1961), the Academy functioned through a virtual artistic monopoly, both for the commissioning of artworks and for the award of its prestigious titles (Bourdieu, 2013, pp. 22, 35–37ff., see also Wikipedia, n.d.). An important blow against its traditional academicism was staged with the 1909 Knave of Diamonds exhibition, a group event, spearheaded by four art students (Aristarch Lentulov, Piotr Kochalovsky, Robert Falk and Ilya Mashkov), who had all been expelled from the Moscow College of the Academy. Their crime? Simply, ‘Leftism’, meaning here to have introduced the brilliant, sated colours and the radical simplification in form of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse (Gray, 1962/1971, pp. 122–123).

A ‘new’ or ‘fresh eye’ was necessary to produce a rupture with this Academic intelligentsia or ‘priesthood’, and, with it, the suspension of all earlier academic conventions. In other words, the modernist rupture created an extraordinary artistic void vis-à-vis the rules of art or, to use Durkheim’s language: it created an artistic ‘anomie’ (Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 238–253; 1992/1996, pp. 132–133; 2021, chs 3.1 and 7; cf. Durkheim, 1897/1989, pp. 241–276).

Of course, this break was not brought about by artists at a time strictly parallel with that of the October Revolution, as though it were the purely ‘superstructural’ expression in art of the new political economy. The revolutionary prominence of El Lissitsky, Tatlin, Malevich and the others had required the earlier work of Larionov and Goncharova in sifting through ‘the most live and progressive ideas in Europe and Russia from the beginning of the century up to the First World War’ (Gray, 1962/1971, p. 96). In turn, Larionov’s and Goncharova’s experimental use of European painters was built on the achievements of Edouard Manet.

It is Manet whom Bourdieu sees as inaugurating the ‘symbolic revolution’ in modern painting. Manet, he argues, as an Academic insider, possessed a profound knowledge of art history and yet – despite his Academic training – was deeply subversive; indeed, much more transgressive than were Courbet and the French Realists, with their new subjects (Bourdieu, 2013). Manet’s two large paintings of 1863, for example – Déjeuner sur L’Herbe and Olympia – conspicuously broke with the Academic hierarchy, an artistic hierarchy which had hitherto honoured only Biblical and historical themes with the largest-scale, most sacralised forms of representation. Indeed, his 1863 works, with their secular and contemporary subjects, used compositions that refused to ‘form a pyramid’ as in the traditional visual conventions governing the lines of perspective. Further, Manet’s sketchy, hatched brushstrokes broke with the stylistic rules of ‘fini’ (‘finish’ or close-brushed detail), without which the work was regarded by the ‘academic eye’ as incomplete.

Alongside the destruction of the Academic rules and the unprecedented artistic ‘anomie’ initiated by Manet, new social structures had also emerged. In Bourdieu’s terms, a new field of cultural production had been instituted: new dealers on the market, new exhibition spaces, new forms of art education. In particular, a form of dualism now became consolidated, between the ‘restricted’ (or avant-garde) field and the ‘large-scale’, more commercial field (Bourdieu, 1993, 1992/1996, 2013).

This fundamental symbolic revolution, spearheaded by Manet, was a prerequisite for Larionov’s Rayonnism with its 1913 Manifesto of the ‘Society of Free Esthetics’ [sic] and what Mayakovsky described as a ‘Cubist interpretation of “Impressionism”’ (Gray, 1962/1971, p. 140). It later engendered Malevich’s and Lissitsky’s Suprematism, and the Constructivism of Tatlin, Brik, Stepanova, Rodchenko and Lissitsky. In terms of revolutionary breaks, Malevich thoughtfully drew attention to how they might be differently timed in divergent fields:

Cubism and Futurism were the revolutionary forms in art, foreshadowing the revolution in political and economic life of 1917. (Malevich, quoted in Gray, 1962/1971, p. 219)

Perhaps the greatest pioneer of photography in the revolution was Alexander Rodchenko. He thought of himself as an ‘artist-engineer’ and famously designed clothes and everyday objects as well as practising photography. Yet, after the feared Petrograd Academy of Arts was closed in 1918, it was Rodchenko to whom Lunacharski, the Commissar for the Enlightenment (Narkompros), turned. Most notably, it was Rodchenko who set up the famous svomas – laboratory or experimental schools – inside the new Museums of Artistic Culture supported by Narkompros, such as the Petrograd Free Studios (Clark, 1999). Within these there were no qualifications for entry; moreover, students had a totally free choice as to which art departments they would work in.

The Constructivists, with their new organisation, UNOVIS (Supporters of the New Forms of Art), were intent on nothing other than transforming the entire relationship between art and social practice. One of the most insightful writers on the UNOVIS movement is T. J. Clark, who sees it through the prism of the regional organisations in 1920, especially that of the art school in Vitebsk (now in Belarus), at an early stage of the Russian Revolution. Using Malevich’s philosophical reflections, God is Not Cast Down (1922), and a close analysis of Malevich’s paintings from Vitebsk, as well as those of his disciple, Lissitsky, and the works of Tatlin and Rodchenko, Clark makes some extraordinarily interesting claims. He elucidates in exactly what sense it was felt in Russia that ‘the time for pictures is past’, to quote Malevich’s letter of 1915 (cited in Clark, 1999, p. 216). Even colour was surpassed: ‘“Colour”’, stated Malevich, ‘is the fire of the ancien regime’ (p. 234).

Clark argues that it was the Constructivists who offered the freshest and most consistent ideas of utopia, the kernel of this being their vision of a ‘new man’ (cf. also Stirton, 2019, p. 28). For instance, from Malevich’s and Lissitsky’s arresting images of geometrical objects dynamically ‘conquering the black night’ there emerged equally vivid currents of new thought. Moreover, these abstracted forms became distributed widely, available at least for the ‘exhorting classes’, i.e. all those who galvanised the wider social efforts to herald the emergent industrial society. Thus it might be said that UNOVIS and especially Malevich dramatised in their paintings ‘the inner meaning of the economic plan’ (Clark, 1999, p. 294).

To establish a modern symbolic institution requires a new ‘illusio’ (Bourdieu), that is, an engagement with an entirely different set of stakes in the artistic game. Artists now sacrificed themselves to making works for which their sole reward was often only other artists’ recognition: a reversal of medieval artists’ search for monetary success or the recognition offered by priestly academicians (cf. Bourdieu, 2021, ch. 3.1). In this respect, if Lunacharski was one of the self-styled ‘Commissars’ of the Soviet Enlightenment, Rodchenko was one of the iconoclastic prophets of the new artistic order. It was Rodchenko who helped establish not just entirely new genres, including photomontage, but new art schools, such as Inkhuk and Vkhutemas. In other words, he (with others) founded in Russia a new artistic field with a new mode of artistic reproduction (or training) – but also new conflicts. Had I space, I would address further the most fateful of these conflicts: the splits over the delegation to the Union of Soviet Artists of the life-shattering power to define who really counts as an artist. From the time of the 1928 ‘Cultural Revolution’ (in effect a counter-revolution), which culminated in 1932 (Fitzpatrick, 1978), this power of categorisation was delegated to an uncreative bureaucrat: namely, Andrei Zhdanov (Bourdieu & Haacke, 1995, p. 73, also p. 51).

However, from these Cubo-Futurist roots, the renaissance of the arts that had been spearheaded most notably in backward Russia was organised around the revitalisation of certain genres and experimental innovation in other art-forms. John Willett, one of its early scholars, has identified it recently with:

. . . productivism, cinema, the documentary movement, the new architecture, the different aspects of montage and all the problems associated with a sociological approach to art. (2018, p. 82)

This twentieth-century renaissance ‘engag[ed] art in the long effort to produce social, economic and technological change’ (p. 83). It lasted until the late 1920s,

. . . even after the failure of the revolution. So there remained some connection with the revolutionary movement, a connection favoured by the Russo-German alignment in the 1920s. For as long as it lasted, from the Rhine to the Urals, this social-artistic renaissance remained notably coherent. (p. 84)

It was to have a profound effect on the art of the camera, not just in the Russian-German alignment of the 1920s, but throughout Eastern and Western Europe, with, for example, remarkable contributors from Czechoslovakia (e.g. Karel Teige, Lubomir Linhart) and Hungary (e.g. Kata Kalman, Arpad Szélpad) (Witkovsky, 2007).

The East European Constructivists fully accepted the technological aspect of the camera, but also praised the ‘New Vision’ it offered. Thus Laszlo Moholy-Nagy – a friend of Rodchenko, El Lissitsky and Tschichold – singled out the role of photography in defamiliarising the world (Moholy-Nagy, 1925/1967). Stirton captures well the great stakes for photography as a crucial component of the avant-garde, as Moholy-Nagy envisaged:

The entire project, embracing typography, photography and film, would become subsumed under a general term, ‘the New Vision’, in which the visible world could be understood and interpreted anew by the fundamental shift that the camera lens had effected on our optical awareness. To Moholy-Nagy, the New Vision had implications for print culture that were as significant as the invention of moveable type. (Stirton, 2019, p. 94)

This is sometimes forgotten with the mundane character of the camera today.

The Russian Revolution and the canonisation of photography

There is a paradox at the heart of the sociology of photography. It is this: Russian Futurism had been deeply hostile to what it called the ‘dead art’ of the museum. Yet it was that same movement – Russian Futurism, including Constructivism – that first led to the canonisation of photography in museums. Rodchenko was a highly significant player in this: not only did he revolutionise photography via his productivist ethos and his Saint-Simonian idea of the avant-gardist artist-engineer, but he was also fully behind the workers’ photographic movement.

Indeed, drawing on what Raymond Williams calls ‘an emergent structure of feeling’ – developed also by Gustav Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, Elizar Langman, Semen Fridliand, Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova ² – it is Rodchenko who stands out for his exceptional blend of abstraction and photography. ³ He thus contributed to what Margaret Rose calls Marx’s ‘lost’ modernist ‘aesthetic’: in other words, Marx’s approbatory view of the Saint-Simonian avant-garde – artists along with scientists and engineers – whom he envisaged being brought close to the proletariat (Rose, 1984, pp. 94–96, 126–142, 156–163). Rather than the structuring relationship between class and art-form summarised in the simplistic metaphor of ‘reflection’ (Silva, 2023, pp. 53–64), this was a ‘productivist’ view of art, later to become submerged:

. . . the Saint-Simonist concept of an avant-garde of ‘artistic producers’ was to remain subsumed, though not entirely silent, in Marxist theory after Marx. (Rose, 1984, p. 96; cf. Benjamin, 1970)

In particular, Rodchenko brought to a logical conclusion the emergent break with Renaissance conventions of perspective. Producing an art of estrangement (or ‘defamiliarisation’) via the unusual angles from which he shot his photographs, this experimental work was what his fellow-photographer Langman labelled a ‘shock mechanism’:

It is necessary to photograph ordinary, familiar objects from totally unexpected vantage points and in unexpected combinations; by contrast, new objects should be photographed from various perspectives, giving a full impression of their appearance. . . . While taught to look in a routine and traditional manner, we must discover the visual world anew. We must revolutionize our visual thinking. We must remove the cataracts from our eyes. (Rodchenko, from ‘Roads to Contemporary Photography’, Novi Lef, 9, 1928, cited in Bojko, 1972, p. 19) ⁴

Rodchenko and the avant-garde photographers – like Proust, whom Bourdieu cites – ‘recharged perception’ and thus altered people’s vision and division of the world via new compositional techniques. Steve Edwards lists these well:

. . . ‘bird’s eye’ or ‘worm’s eye’ views; extreme and unusual close-ups; pictures that called attention to the frame by dramatic cropping; tilted horizons; fragmentation; and the use of geometric and repetitive forms. (Edwards, 2004, p. 403)

Like Benjamin, Edwards stresses that the technology of the camera is no bar to this modernist ‘New Vision’. Indeed, the camera’s properties, which permitted multiple exposures, X-ray, microphotography, reflective and other light effects, transformed pictorial photography (p. 403). From these Constructivist beginnings, there developed the photomontage of German artists such as Hannah Höch (see, for example, her satirical 1919 work Cut with a Kitchen Knife Dada through the Beer-Belly of the Weimar Republic) and Jan Tschichold (e.g. his film posters such as Napoleon [1927] and Woman without a Name [1927] (Stirton, 2019, pp. 42, 44).

Most importantly, Constructivists like Lissitsky, Rodchenko, the Stenberg brothers, Lavinsky, etc. effectively interrogated the condescending notion of ‘low art’ by embracing popular media as well as the Cubist forms of autonomous art. These artists produced photomontages in the form of poster designs for magazines, exhibitions and popular films (such as Buster Keaton’s The General). They consciously transcended boundaries, going from adverts for new detective novels, or fashion magazines, on the one hand, to a less lighthearted aesthetic of ascetic collective labour on the other, as in Klutsis’ poster depiction of coal-miners or of serried rows of peasants ploughing with the first tractors.

As Bojko claims, ‘It was Rodchenko who elevated mass printing . . . to the rank of genuine graphic art’ (1972, p. 25). Such an ‘elevation’ of popular subject-matter into avant-garde artistic depiction was later to be taken up more widely (Gopnik & Varnedoe, 1990).

The Workers’ Photography Movement

To what extent was the Soviet ‘experiment in art’ also a genuinely popular movement, spreading amongst uneducated workers and peasants? Since it undoubtedly requires both education and leisure to understand the conventions that these avant-gardists were fighting against, this is a difficult question. It should not be brushed aside by a chic populism.

Be that as it may, although Bourdieu never refers to it explicitly, Soviet photography was one of the key moments of a realist modernist aesthetic. For this was ‘a style of photography that combines avant-garde art and political thought’ (Borja-Villel, 2011; see also Gray, 1962/1971; Roberts, 2014, p. 116). Roberts points out that the importance of the widely-circulating photo-text books – such as Rodchenko and Mayakovsky’s Pro Eto (1923) and Heartfield’s Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles (1929) – was that these allowed photographers and writers to incorporate the

. . . veridical demands of the photodocument within the general space of a modernist spectatorship. And, crucially, this was both a political and a formal strategy. In refusing to separate the veridical from artistic spectatorship, a realism of the event and a modernism of form were seen as interdependent and therefore an exemplary form of cultural politicization. (2014, p. 116)

The industrial working class, together with the machines with which they worked, now became a subject for art. Marx had once observed sardonically that French peasants ‘cannot represent themselves; they must be represented’ (1852/2000, p. 131). But in the period after the Russian Revolution, workers for the first time were beginning to represent themselves (Borja-Villel, 2011, p. iii). Not only did they take control of the means of production through soviets, but also the means of visual production – producing new images of trains, factories, massive machines and their operatives. So Constructivism was not merely a modernist movement for artists from art schools; from 1923 in Russia it also flowered more widely via interlocking circles of worker and peasant correspondents. These correspondents were inculcated into the uses of the camera, despite their high costs: an entire group often owned only one camera between them.

The journal Sovetskoe Foto (later Proletarskoe Foto) – founded and edited in 1926 by Mikhail Kol’tsov and supported by the photographers Arkaddii Shaikhet and Semen Fridliand – reveals certain fascinating features of these leagues. First, there was a widespread diffusion of the view that photographers would be the ‘gravediggers of the brush’, just as oil painting had replaced the fresco in late medieval Europe (Volkov-Lannit, 1928/2011, pp. 56–58). Second, in the 1920s especially, there was active encouragement of these leagues from Lenin, Lunacharski and the Russian State Commissariat of the Enlightenment onwards. Nevertheless, although the movement was originally, in the mid-1920s, made up of worker correspondents or peasant correspondents, by 1929, the worker-members had become only a small minority in comparison with the professional photographers, especially as contributors to exhibitions outside the USSR (Wolf, 2011, pp. 43–44).

This is perhaps not surprising given the demands made by photography in terms of both craft and artistic mastery. But the rise of Zhdanov in the early 1930s and his romanticised ‘socialist realism’ also played a part, with the consequent waning of creativity. Already, in 1928, with the Cultural Revolution of that year, a split had occurred within the Soviet groups of photographers over subject-matter and style: that is, between ‘objective reportorial photography and more abstract formalist photography’ (Ribalta, 2011, p. 13). The photojournalists in Sovetskoe Foto – especially those in the Russian Association of Proletarian Photo Reporters (ROPF) (1931–2) – were highly critical of the aesthetic position-takings of the groups associated with October, Lef and Novyi Lef (Fridliand et al., 1931/2011, pp. 67–69; Ribalta, 2011, pp. 15–16). This antagonism led Rodchenko and Tret’iakov to refocus on photojournalism but did not ultimately save the Association itself. By 1932, the cultural restructuring of the Central Committee had led to its demise (Taylor, 1995, p. 251), leaving the more traditional ‘objectivist’ photojournalists to conquer the field.

Despite these various obstacles, the Soviet popular photography movement of the 1920s and 1930s had multiple connections with the later worker-photography movements in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, France, Holland, Belgium, the UK and the US. This was an early, unrecognised, form of cultural globalisation. Note, for example, the participation of Lissitsky in the Ring neue Werbegestalter exhibition in 1927 (Munich) and in the 1929 Stuttgart Film und Foto exhibition (Ribalta, 2011, p. 13; Stirton, 2019, pp. 8, 48). Note, too, that the German, Heartfield, travelled to the USSR in 1931–2 (Willett, 2018, p. 79). He befriended Al’pert, Shaikhet and others, later pioneering in Germany the photomontage that had been originally developed in Soviet Russia. To this he added his distinctive mark (Ades, 1986; Stumberger, 2011, p. 88; Willett, 2018, p. 80). Further, Tina Modotti, the Italian-Mexican photographer, was another key figure, one of whose photos appeared on the cover of the mass-circulation German AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung – Workers’ Illustrated News) in 1928 and others in Der Arbeiter Fotograf in 1930, after she, too, had visited Moscow (Lowe, 1998; Ribalta, 2011, p. 14). In relation to this, a renewed wave of canonisation in photography and photomontage has recently occurred, via exhibitions and research. ⁵ This embraces the powerful inter-war work of leading individual artists such as Heartfield. See, amongst many examples, his Swastika: In This Sign Shall You Be Betrayed and Sold! (1932); The Finest Products of Capitalism (1932), in which he juxtaposes a shop-window model in an expensive wedding dress with a figure of the homeless unemployed; or his parody of the economics of militarism, Hurrah! the Butter is Finished! (1935). ⁶

As Bürger remarks, Heartfield had returned via photomontage to ‘an old art of emblem and used it politically’ (1984, p. 75). But, moving beyond singling out innovative individuals such as Heartfield or Tschichold, the recent exhibiting of these photographers has rather had as its stake that of ‘[r]escuing the [entire] movement from oblivion, marginalisation, repression and returning it to the limelight’ (Ribalta, 2011, p. iv, my italics). One of the leading figures here, who has rediscovered this widespread movement with its ‘constitution of a “photographic public sphere”’, has been the writer and editor Jorge Ribalta, with his important book The Worker Photography Movement (1926–1939) (see Ribalta, 2011, p. iv).

His task has been to ‘probe into the canonical description of the emergence of photographic modernism during the interwar period’ (Ribalta, 2011, p. iv). Initial attempts at evaluating this occurred in the 1970s. But we now have a mass of new material, for example, detailed research on the Soviet-inspired German magazine AIZ (1924–38, see above), which published Heartfield’s photomontages prolifically, in a circulation of as many as half a million copies, using 4,600 freelance sellers. AIZ succeeded in becoming the second-largest circulating magazine in Germany (Stumberger, 2011, pp. 84–85; see also Broué, 1971/2006). Perhaps even more surprisingly, this archival analysis also suggests that the original viewing public for this photography was mainly working-class. For we now know that in 1929 AIZ’s readers were 42% skilled workers, 33% unskilled (i.e. 75% manual workers in total), 10% employees, 5% juveniles, 3.5% housewives, 3% freelancers, 2% self-employed and 1% civil servants (Stumberger, 2011, p. 85).

The new studies, from the 1990s, address the transnational connections of this workers’ film and photography movement. They stress the emergence of what certain German writers conceptualised as the ‘proletarian public sphere’ (Negt & Kluge, 1972/2016), which often linked together political and artistic movements.

See, in this context, the French movement, with its newspaper Regards, and its mix of named and anonymous photographers. One front cover, a photomontage, refers back to Delacroix’s famous painting (discussed already), Liberty Leading the People; another has a portrayal of Renault workers, by an unknown photographer. A French photographer, Roger Schall, included memorable images of impoverished peasants, as well as of workers.

See also – more unexpectedly – the once-flourishing New York Film and Photo League, later the Photo League (1936–51), in which Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland were on the Advisory Board, Margaret Bourke-White a member and Paul Strand its ‘patron saint’ (Tucker, 2011, pp. 326–327). Strand (1890–1976), who became, perhaps, the most well-known, produced in 1939–40 an iconic anti-Nazi image of a skeleton placed, like a crucifix, on a large swastika. It was he who was most prominent and respected in discussing questions such as ‘what subjects to photograph and how to bond political beliefs and modern aesthetics in one’s work’ (Tucker, 2011, p. 327).

This recent research reveals that many film and photo leagues had collapsed even before World War II and the impact of the Cold War. On the one hand, the booming German Association of Worker Photographers had to close following the 1933 election of the Nazis; on the other, the British movement – which had become ‘virtually non-existent’ – ceased functioning in 1938 for financial reasons (Forbes, 2011, pp. 207–208). The New York Photo League lasted longer, until 1951, but was then crushed by McCarthyism (Tucker, 2011, p. 331).

Interestingly, Forbes concludes that ‘a proletarian aesthetic, in photography at least, was rarely constitutive of communist culture in Britain between the wars’ (Forbes, 2011, p. 216). John Roberts calls this a ‘missed opportunity’ although one that had still facilitated the work of various women photographers, including the notable Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky, a Viennese refugee), who photographed the Welsh mining communities amongst other subjects (Roberts, 2014). Such a photographic aesthetic should ideally be related in future studies to the industrial, proletarian or ‘regional’ novel, also particularly strong between the wars (see e.g. Williams, 1980, pp. 213–233).

Yet there was a renaissance of photomontage in the 1970s. This was not just in the hands of women artists, such as Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) or Martha Rosler (b. 1943) but also in those of the ‘racialised outsider’ (Virdee, 2014, 2019), especially African-American working-class artists, such as Romare Bearden and Kay Brown. Bearden, in particular, has been belatedly canonised by a solo exhibition at the prestigious Smithsonian in Washington, DC in 2014, whilst the 2017 exhibition at the Tate Modern in London includes the powerful 1970s and 1980s photomontages of Bearden and Brown in a group retrospective entitled Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Godfrey & Whitley, 2017). These are not just fascinating in showing that Rodchenko, Höch and Heartfield had an unexpected group of artistic descendants. It also illustrates the continued artistic use of photomontage and mixed media to bind Black people together round a powerful symbolic critique of racist violence and class and gender oppression (cf. Swados, 1968, p. 235). And this began in 1963 when the New York School of abstract abstractionism was at its height.. . .

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would contend that Bourdieu’s predictions that photography would always be condemned to be a ‘minor’ art have been proved to be ill-judged. Indeed, as early as 1905 in the West, moves towards canonisation were initiated by the American Alfred Stieglitz, in The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 291, Fifth Avenue, New York. In the 1920s, in the States, this consecration was extended to other galleries, although, the first major twentieth-century British photographic exhibition was only held very belatedly, in 1989 (Fowler, 2005, p. 55). It is also somewhat ironical, in terms of Bourdieu’s claim, that his own photographs of Algeria might now be undergoing canonisation ⁷ (Bourdieu, 2003; see also Back, 2009). ⁸

This raises the questions, first, as to whether Bourdieu’s views in 1965 about the future improbability of consecration in the photographic field have been proved mistaken and, secondly, whether he failed to detect early signs of specific consecration, despite the extraordinary growth of photographic practice. In the twenty-first century, after his death in 2002, smartphones and digital photography have of course rendered such images ubiquitous.

The first, his prediction, has undoubtedly turned out to be inadequate: the history of photography is now taught in university art history courses as well as in art schools. It thus meets his own stipulation for consecration: that it should become seen as the object of the ‘scholarly gaze’ with all the attendant dedication this produces.

The second – the unacknowledged trajectory of photographic recognition – also seem to me a weakness of his study, as I hope to have shown. This failure to uncover the roots of photography’s consecration, should, however, be contextualised more broadly. An analogous case appears to be that of English Literature, which did not become a fully legitimate study until after it had been taught in the nineteenth century in Mechanics’ Institutes to working-class students and, subsequently, to Indian students being trained for the professions (Ahmad, 1992, pp. 266–279). Indeed, English Literature was not placed on the Oxford and Cambridge curricula until after World War I, at which time, the novel was still excluded because it was a popular genre (Eagleton, 1983, pp. 26–31).

It is also the case that many distinguished photojournalists – such as the Magnum photographers, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullin and Sebastião Salgado – have had no aspirations to be perceived as artists (Miller, 1999). Indeed, McCullin actively repudiated the label (McCullin, 2002). Yet they now find themselves part of this consecrated artistic genre.

Enhanced artistic value has been accompanied belatedly by increased market value for investors. As Alison Eldridge has shown, the prices for photographic works by the most recognised practitioners have risen dramatically:

The auction market for fine art photography, which has been driven mostly by contemporary photographers, saw an increase of 22% in 2013 [from 2012 . . .]. Total photography sales were up over all by 36% with the collected auction sales of Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips coming in at $50.7 million. . . . ‘Vintage prints’ by photographers such as Ansel Adams, have reached as much as $518,500 each. (Eldridge, 2015, pp. 340–341)

This is not to argue that aesthetic canonisation and legitimacy can be measured in terms of monetary exchange-value. But it acknowledges – as Bourdieu does more generally – that those works within the artistic subfield that acquire classic status eventually produce long-run financial returns (Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 100–101, 105; see also Bourdieu & Haacke, 1995, p. 97).

Canonisation itself is a deeply contradictory phenomenon (cf. Azoulay, 2012). For while it acts as a modality of collective memory, this turning of counter-memory and popular memory into ‘official memory’, legitimated via State-subsidised galleries, comes at some cost. It rarely occurs at the time when the art emerges as part of a genuinely popular movement. It can also bring about its own dilemmas, due to the complex blurring of boundaries, in this case, between news-photography and fine art photography. The struggle for originality and authorship sits uneasily with the very different struggles of bearing witness to momentous events (Eldridge, 2015, Solaroli, 2016, pp. 60–63). Similar conflicts are evident in Bourdieu’s discussions elsewhere of the literary field, where he describes the tension between bestselling naturalist novelists like Émile Zola and those such as Flaubert in the restricted subfield (1996, 2021, ch. 3.1). Bourdieu’s heritage may be the theoretical support that his work provides for those researchers who wish to import these kinds of analyses into the field of photography.

More immediately, the aura of photography and photomontages in art galleries is such that they may be simply aestheticised, wrested from the active ethical/political meanings of their original contexts and effectively neutralised, as Benjamin (1999, pp. 459–466), Phillips (1987), Roberts (2014) and Rosler (2004) point out. ⁹ The arena of art may even operate so that ‘The actual and symbolic violence of the world is placed at a distance’ (Roberts, 2014, p. 45). In Rosler’s cogent words: ‘as “art” takes centre stage, news is pushed to the margins’ (2004, p. 246).

Thus, paradoxically, we might elaborate further on Bourdieu’s book Distinction, with its unpalatable sociological realism. We might show how – following the artistic consecration of the Russian Revolutionary avant-garde – even the art of African-American artists addressing issues of racial oppression may be tragically appropriated by the white dominant class ¹⁰ to become a badge of their own symbolic power (cf. Bourdieu, 1984).