ARKADII SHAIKHET
Russian
One of the leading figures of the early Soviet era in
photography, Arkadii (also Arkady) Shaikhet was
among the group of pioneering photographers who
forged the foundations of modern photojournalism.
Born in Nikolayev in 1898, after primary school
Shaikhet went to work as a locksmith’s apprentice
before moving to Moscow in 1918. In 1922, he took a
job as a retoucher for a portrait photographer, and
by 1924 had moved from the portrait studio to
become a photojournalist with the popular publica-
tions Robochaya Gazeta (Workers’ Gazette) and
Ogonek. His career continued to be successful, culmi-
nating in, during the 1930s, his contributions to the
influential international magazine,USSR na stroike
(USSR in Construction).
Shaikhet was, along with Max Alpert and Solo-
mon Tules, one of the authors of the documentary
projectTwenty-Four Hours in the Life of the Filippov
Family. Conceived by a member of the Austrian ‘‘So-
ciety of Friends of the USSR,’’ to the Soviet Photo
Agency Soyuz Foto so that the European audience
might better understand the advancement being
accomplished by the Communist Revolution, the
project was supervised by Soyuz Foto editor Lazar
Mezhericher. Executed in four days in July 1931 by
the three photographers, it was eventually published
as a cover story in the German weeklyArbeiter Il-
lustrierte Zeitung.
The series was devised to show in a direct and
straightforward manner the home, work, and leisure
activities of the family of Nikolai Filippov, a metal
worker at Moscow’s Red Proletarian factory. Along
with panoramic views of Moscow neighborhoods,
the layout included pictures of the Filippovs’ pre-
vious log residence contrasted with their new modern
apartment. These images made clear the prosperity of
Soviet life with comparison to pre-Soviet poverty.
The series reflects Shaikhet and Alpert’s desire to
capture concrete reality as an organic whole in
which individual parts and the whole form a dialec-
tical unity. The work proved extremely influential,
establishing the photo essay as an important photo-
graphic genre.
In a companion article, ‘‘How We Photographed
the Filippovs,’’ Shaikhet and Alpert situated them-
selves as proponents of the serial method of docu-
mentary photography, noting that they understood
series ‘‘not as a ‘simple’ display of a succession of
workbenches or detached people at workbenches; a
series has to reveal the social essence of objects and
events as a whole, in their complete dialectical
diversity’’ (quoted in Tupitsyn, 1996). The most
interesting approach to industrial subject matter,
they argued, included the ‘‘observation of some
giant in order to periodically reflect truly well
through snapshots how it began to be built, what
the difficulties of construction were, how it grew...
and finally the collective that emerged a winner in
this struggle’’ (quoted in Tupitsyn, 1996).
The article also offered a criticism of the uncon-
ventional photojournalistic practices deployed by
Alexandr Rodchenko and his associates, those pho-
tographers who arrived ‘‘at a construction site [and]
above all rapaciously jump[ed] on the most effective
parts of it’’ (quoted in Tupitsyn, 1996). Shaikhet
and Alpert maintained that they were ‘‘not against
unusual angles of observation and shifted positions
of the camera during photographing’’ as long as
these techniques were not used to radically alter
the meaning of a representation but rather to high-
light content that has already been well defined
(quoted in Tupitsyn, 1996). Indeed, several photo-
graphs within the Filippov series involve such tech-
niques as diagonal compositions, close-ups, high
views, and spatial compression. These are inter-
spersed, however, alongside images that offer explic-
itly conventional framing and composition.
The conventional representational approaches of-
feredintheTwenty-four Hours in the Life of the Filip-
pov Familyseries led critics such as Sergei Tretiakov,
a major proponent of montage, to offer harsh assess-
ments of the work. Tretiakov dismissed the series
as a ‘‘photo-biographical extract’’ while suggesting
that ‘‘in their photographic traditions, a carefully
posed photograph of two young women with tennis
rackets is no different from photographs of bour-
geois celebrities at fashionable resorts’’ (quoted in
Tupitsyn, 1996). Critics also called attention to fac-
tual errors, most notably a half-empty street car, a
rare sight in Moscow, where street cars were regu-
larly packed. This called into question the authen-
ticity of the photographs.SHAIKHET, ARKADII