The Genius of Photography Review.

“The Genius Of Photography” is a series of BBC’s films showing and exploring its most broad look at one of the world’s most prestigious and honoured art forms investigating every aspect and detail of photography Featuring some of the superior photographs - photographs ever taken and the photographers who took them. This six-part series looks at the history of photography, from Man Ray and Walker Evans to more modern geniuses such as Richard Avedon, Sally Mann and Martin Parr.

In the period,of time following the WWI, photography was the central content of the age. “Anyone who fails to understand photography will be one of the illiterates of the future .” said the Hungarian artist and photographer Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Punctilious, neutral, lucid and considered as machine-like, it was used to encourage the radical utopia of the Soviet Union and to bring order and lucidity to the pandemonium of Weimar Germany. But while some awarded photography for its ability to objective representations, others were using it to look into the illogical, the subjective and the unreal, photography natural language. “The Genius of Photography” – Documents for Artists examines in detail the work of some of the greatest and most influential modern photographers.

The episode featured one of my most favourite Photographers of that time - Rodchenko. As i have found out Rodchenko studied at an art school since 1910 and for another four years, he became a part of the modernism that was developed all over and across Europe. By 1913 he started to call himself a Cubo-Futurist. Through the time of revolutions in 1917 Rodchenko and his wife Stepanova - who was an artist herself, were a part of a vocal and determined avant-garde that stood in an opposition to the academy and the official art of the Tsarist autocracy.

Their artwork was created by experimenting in the confines of the studio, and along with other artists of all sorts they were trying to discover the language of art that would emerge from the horrors of WWI. The revolution of 02.1917 swept away the Tsar, and in October later on that year the Bolshevik revolution swept all the workers to power. Most of the artists, who in a myriad of ways were entwined with the old order, left Russia or waited for the storm to finally pass. The artists of the avant-garde, including Rodchenko, welcomed October and began to try and take art into life.

Since the revolutions Rodchenko took image and ideas of constructivism into design, theatre, typography all into his work, along with photography. His early photographic work was to create montages, usually for Mayakovsky’s long love poem"About That".

As well as he took his camera out onto the streets of Russia to record the optimism of the new society that was raising, to show that future liberation was possible through industry. There is a group of photographs taken in a factory that was producing electric light bulbs and it recalls Lenin’s slogan that socialism was electricity and the Soviet power.

Rodchenko died in Moscow (Russia) in 12.1956, only and just 3 years after Stalin and at a point, after the Hungarian Revolution of that year, when there was to be a resurgence of a socialist left, and a new generation of revolutionaries were to come under the influences and ideas of his work that was continued by them later on in their own, personal way.