The Modern Art Colloquium presents
The Photographer’s Hand; or, Rodchenko Paints the Snapshot
Aglaya Glebova, Associate Professor of Art History, UC Berkeley
Wednesday, November 9, 5:30 PM, 316 ADB
The sense of touch reemerged powerfully in European avant-garde art of the 1930s and 1940s as a counterpoint to the staggering and technologized violence of these decades. Turning to Aleksandr Rodchenko’s little-known overpainted photographs, this talk explores his speculative rethinking of the medium through the hand’s return to the print. Vacillating between recuperative tenderness and violent deformation, Rodchenko’s drawn-out snapshots queried modernist (and his own earlier) attachment to the documentary and the instant, as well as photography’s capacity to be a truth-telling technology.
Aglaya Glebova is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She researches modern art, with a focus on interwar avant-gardes and Soviet art and the history and theory of photography. Glebova’s first book, Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin, received the 2020 Graham Foundation Publication Grant and is coming out with Yale University Press in November 2022. She is now at work on a project that examines ideas of economy, energy, and exhaustion in Soviet art and architecture.
