zines. As a requirement of membership October
photographers were required to supervise photo
workshops in the factories and collective farms.
October photographers outlined their perspective
in a series of self-published essays in which they
rejected the approaches taken both by Western
‘‘abstract left’’ photographers like Man Ray and
La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy as well as the patriotic real-
ism emerging in the Soviet Union. October also
argued against the commercial tendencies in art,
and in artistic patronage, that they saw as resulting
from the return of market forces under Lenin’s New
Economic Program of the civil war period.
We are for a revolutionary photography aesthetically
unconnected with either the traditions of autonomous
painting or the nonobjectivity of ‘‘left photography.’’ We
are for a revolutionary photography, materialist, socially
grounded, and technically well-equipped, one that sets
itself the aim of promulgating and agitating for a socialist
way of life and a Communist culture.
(quoted in Tupitsyn, 1996, 100)
A key feature of their work was its interdisciplin-
arity as they sought to overcome the barriers separ-
ating artists of diverse media. Many October
members experimented with different media while
October photographers experimented in combining
journalistic and avant-garde approaches.
Rodchenko preferred to limit the straightfor-
wardly narrative aspects of his photos. InMachin-
ery is Advancing, produced for the publicationLet’s
Give, Rodchenko used only two images, a tilted
shot of the plant building and close-ups of machin-
ery that excluded their context/surroundings. In-
dustrial imagery is reduced to specific parts rather
than the grand and total images typically provided
by ROPF photographers. These choices would
eventually leave Rodchenko, and others including
his colleague Igantovich, open to charges that they
were suppressing political and social content in
favor of formalist distractions.
Often, especially in the works of October pho-
tographers, workers are overshadowed by images
of production and industry, often presenting only
images of specific body parts such as working
hands. Attention is regularly directed towards the
products and processes of labor rather than the
laborers themselves. In this way the individual
worker is of less significance than the emphasis on
the collective processes responsible for Soviet pro-
ductive advances.
In October works, conventional content was pre-
sented through non-traditional and unpredictable
angles and crops. October photographers offered
challenging and disruptive depictions of industrial
life by using experimental practices, diagonal com-
positions, extreme close-ups, bird’s and worm’s eye
views, cropped horizons, and fragmentary images,
all towards the expression of socialist ideas. In pre-
senting partial and unpredictable depictions of
labor processes, their works were resistant to at-
tempts to ascribe familiar narratives or readily
available meanings. The intention was in fact to
use such photographs as a means of disturbing the
customary routines of everyday life; this disruption
being understood as a necessary part of the revolu-
tionary transformation of life required in the move
from capitalist to socialist social relations. Rod-
chenko, for example, preferred anonymous repre-
sentations of labor in which workers were not
identifiable as a means to break regular associations
and attachments that might otherwise be suggested
to the viewer. The ongoing movement from the old
order that was being dismantled to the new world
under construction would not allow for a reliance
on predictable and comfortable patterns, in work,
community, or photography.
This was quite different from the approach taken
by ROPF photographers who offered photos that
allowed the audience a ready identification with the
people and situations being portrayed. The Union of
Russian Proletarian Photographers, ROPF, begun
around the same time as the October group, opposed
the October Group’s approach, preferring straight-
forward reportage. ROPF was led by those who
pioneered photojournalism, such as Max Alpert
and Arkadii Shaikhet, and included among its num-
ber Mark Markov-Grinberg.
While October photographers preferred a com-
bination of realistic representation with experimen-
tal intentions and initiatives, ROPF photographers
viewed realism as the expression of a social whole,
emphasizing matters of content over formalistic
considerations. In the works of ROPF photogra-
phers, a dialectical relationship exists between the
individual elements and the whole of a series.
The ROPF photographers repudiated notions of
art for art’s sake and preferred a realist emphasis on
content to an experimentalist focus on angles and
frames. An essay by ROPF members published in
Proletarian Photoin 1931 placed the October Group
in the camp of Western abstract left photographers.
At the same time ROPF members came to incorpo-
rate October’s atypical frames and angles.
ROPF’s approach to photography is exemplified
by the influential photo story ‘‘Twenty-Four Hours
in the Life of the Filippov Family’’ produced by
Max Alpert, Arkadii Shaikhet, and Solomon Tules.
The idea for the photo story was proposed by a
member of the Austrian branch of the Society ofSOCIALIST PHOTOGRAPHY