Ghost of communism

Max Penson exhibition in London

In a city where a quotation from Marx adorns the main exhibition at the Tate Gallery, Max Penson's photographs surprise not with formal beauty or well-chosen angles. The works of seventy years ago look like a collective propagandist and agitator - they captivate with sincere pathos, showing pictures of the real country of Utopia, where they sow the reasonable, the good, the eternal. There is no doubt that the canals that are dug with pickaxes will flow into the right place, athletes will prepare for work and especially defense in time, schoolchildren will cope with weapons that fall into their hands - it is not for nothing that an unearthly light is pouring in the meeting room of the Central Executive Committee of Uzbekistan. I don’t want to think about what happened after - the photographer lived with his people: he burned photographs in the late 1930s, lost his job during the years of the fight against cosmopolitanism, his archive was pulled out from the ruins after the earthquake (1966), and his name was remembered in the late 1980s.

The huge “Somerset House” has become a branch of Russian museums: the Hermitage rooms are located here, and the exhibition “Russia - Britain” from the Kremlin Museums, sparkling with gold and silver in English work. But all these are legends of deep antiquity and remnants of former luxury: against their background, Penson’s exhibition looks like a semblance of a revolution - very relevant. His oriental stories (women freed from the burqa, young men keen on sports, great construction projects transforming a backward economy into something progressive-industrial) are not propaganda cliches, but the truth of another life.

Penson was not a provincial photographer; he worked for the Tashkent newspaper Pravda Vostoka - at the forefront of building a new world. The time was such that whether you like it or not, both a pen and a camera were equated to a bayonet. Military terminology was readily used everywhere - the ubiquitous Penson recorded the construction of canals, the propaganda of the census, the installation of a radio, work in a weaving factory, steam locomotives rushing into the future, parades, the younger generation mastering weapons and wise progressive old men in national clothes. Distances did not interfere - rarely participating in exhibitions (especially foreign ones), he received a gold medal at the World Exhibition in Paris for “The Uzbek Madonna”. Working far from the capitals, he almost completely designed one of the issues of the legendary magazine “USSR on Construction”. Brought to Central Asia from what is now Belorussian Velizh by the First World War and pogroms, Penson took up photography almost by accident - he was given a camera. Now in Moscow, Penson’s work and biography are well known mainly thanks to exhibitions of the Moscow House of Photography and its director Olga Sviblova, who has been promoting the photographer’s work for ten years. His exhibition has already been seen in France and Sweden.

The Moscow House of Photography, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, works with the same enthusiasm as the canal builders in Penson’s photographs. Sviblova introduces our audience to foreign stars, and abroad - to domestic masters who are not very well known there. While writing the national history of photography as she goes, she strives to complement the world history, which contains almost no names of Russian photographers. And it works.

Faina BALAKHOVSKAYA, London-Moscow