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London,
The march of progress: Uzbekistan from 1920-40
As Cold War-style events hog our attention, this appealing exhibition draws us back to a time when the Soviet machine was still being built. Between 1920 and 1940, Max Penson documented the rapid transformation of Uzbekistan from a feudal Islamic society to a collectivised, industrialised Soviet state.
His collected work - the second Russian photography show at Somerset House to be funded by Roman Abramovich - captures a fascinating point in history while promoting Penson as a forgotten pioneer.
Born in 1893, Penson studied art in Lithuania and began taking photographs after moving to Uzbekistan in 1921. His work for the Pravda News Agency was published widely around the USSR, while filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein praised his historical significance.
His early 1920s images record a centuries-old, rural-Muslim, cottongrowing community in agricultural scenes as lyrical as Corbet's paintings: men hoe fields, women are hidden-by blankets and head shawls. Within two decades, they were fasttracked into another century, athletic women now wearing shorts and working in factories, men driving tractors on collective farms.
Like his famous Moscow contemporaries, the Constructivists El Lissitsky and Yuri Rodchenko, Penson created a new aesthetic for his times through stark lighting and geometrical designs, as his Tashkent colleagues still laboured in 19th-century studio portraiture.
His own Modernism is highly sophisticated, relishing angled shots and the use of diagonals in The Board Room of the Central Executive Committee, 1935 where two shafts of light crash across a room.
A Military Parade of soldiers wearing goggles exploits the graphic perfection of their rows, while a closeup of a weeping crowd is timeless photo-journalism. In 1949, Penson's Jewishness cost him his job, and he burned hundreds of prints on bonfires.
This magnificent tribute reveals his skilful balance between empathy for the individual and depicting the Soviet collective. A must.
• www.russianact.co.uk: 020 7420 9400.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
