Female images in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography: from individual representation to a collective ideal

Abstract

The article analyzes images of women in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography of the 1920s–1930s and their artistic and ideological function within the context of early Soviet visual culture. The relevance of the study lies in the need to clarify the role of the female figure in shaping the “new vision” and in the emergence of normative models of representation in Soviet visual discourse. The aim of the research is to trace the dynamics of the shift from images in portraits of the author’s closest circle to the construction of the “new woman” as a collective ideal. The material for analysis includes Lilya Brik in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Studio (1924), Portrait of Mother (1924), Varvara Stepanova. Double Portrait (1925), Girl with a “Leica” (1933). The methodological framework combines formalcompositional, iconographic, and semiotic analysis, supplemented by cultural-historical context. The results show that in Rodchenko’s work the female figure is not a secondary motif but a meaningforming element of the “new vision”: viewpoint, diagonal composition, fragmentation, and series-based approach operate as a visual rhetoric of modernization, translating corporeality into a language of collectivity, ideological normativity, and social inclusion. It is demonstrated that the shift from personalized images to typologized forms of representation is accompanied by a change in the status of portraiture from the fixation of individuality to the production of a socially significant model. The main conclusion is that female images in Rodchenko’s photography function as a mediator between Constructivist form and the project of transforming the subject in Soviet culture, as Constructivist devices convert the private female portrait into a representation of a social role and a typological image aligned with this project.