Pine Trees in Pushkin Park

Alexander Rodchenko

1927 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Avant-garde photographers generally were not much interested in landscape, a genre associated with pastoral and sublime notions. Rodchenko characteristically found the natural setting of his country house accidental and unorganized: "A bush here, a tree there, a gully, nettles." There seemed nothing to make a photograph from, he wrote, until he looked up to see the trees towering above him "like telephone poles." His raking shot from below proposes vertigo instead of a sylvan calm, a dynamic alternative to the traditional horizons of the landscape view.

Artist

Alexander Rodchenko

Date

1927

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Ford Motor Company Collection, Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell, 1987