Photography's Undoing: Aleksandr Rodchenko and the White Sea-Baltic Canal

This dissertation examines Soviet propaganda photographs of one of the first Gulags, the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1931-1933). It focuses on a photoessay created by the avant-garde artist Aleksandr Rodchenko for the December 1933 issue of the deluxe propaganda journal USSR in Construction [SSSR na stroike]. In the early 1930s the Soviet government attempted to present Gulags as a humane way to rehabilitate criminals. Accordingly, the narrative arc of Rodchenko's photoessay traces the history of the Canal's building according to an official policy termed "reforging" [perekovka], or reeducation through labor. However, as this dissertation shows, Rodchenko's photoessay makes for strange and, at times, anemic propaganda: its layouts frequently open themselves up to ambiguity and multivalence, failing to supply a single propagandistic reading. The reason for the work's failure to cohere pictorially and ideologically is, I argue, twofold: on the one hand, Stalinist aesthetics were not homogenous, with the early 1930s a time of especially heated polemics. Hence, the photoessay's conflicting visual modes frequently mirror the state's ongoing quest for the best way to imagine and represent itself, a quest that moreover reveals Stalinism's fraught relationship to photography and its indexicality. On the other hand, I investigate the possibility that Rodchenko's own artistic ideals may have shifted during his time at the Canal. In order to do so, I read the photoessay against private photographs and studio experiments that were not published during the photographer's lifetime, and which have remained little studied