Sovetskoe Foto

[4] Koltsov launched Sovetskoe Foto as a forum for photojournalists across the country, Soviet in ethos, and distinct from Pictorialist art photography.

10, October 1927 (above) featured the well-known Aleksandr Rodchenko portrait Mat’ ('Mother'), of 1924, but by as early as April 1928, thus even before Socialist Realism was decreed in 1934 to be the official style of the Soviet Union, the works of avant-garde photographers, including Rodchenko’s, were denounced in a reader’s letter as ‘formalist’, foreign and elitist, ‘plagiarised’ from Western European photographers László Moholy-Nagy and Albert Renger-Patzsch.

Rodchenko’s work was banished from the magazine and he had to use Novy Lef, a journal for alternative art and culture, to respond.

[6] Though the Soviet regime isolated its population from outside influences, and though photography served a more directly propagandistic purpose than elsewhere, there are clear overlaps in the type of imagery in the magazine with counterparts in the West;[9] its inter-war humanist tendency and subject matter has parallels in Western Europe in Vu and the United States in Life.

By the 1970s and 1980s, contributors shared a fascination with abstraction, posterisation and optical effects with photographers whose work was found in the Swiss Camera of the same period.