Front / Recto

  • Title Untitled
  • Negative Date 1927–28
  • Print Date 1927–32
  • Medium Gelatin silver print
  • Dimensions Image 5 1/4 × 3 1/2" (13.4 × 8.9 cm)
  • Place Taken Zaporozhye
  • Credit Line Thomas Walther Collection. Abbott-Levy Collection funds, by exchange
  • MoMA Accession Number 1894.2001
  • Description

    The avant-garde Soviet film director Dziga Vertov redefined the medium of still and motion-picture photography through the concept of kinoglaz (translated as “cine-eye,” “film-eye,” or “kino-eye”), which asserted that the camera lens’s proficiency in recording made it superior to the human eye. In one double-image shot from Vertov’s 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom), the eye is superimposed on the camera lens to form an indivisible apparatus fit to view, process, and convey reality all at once.

    In 1919 Vertov formed the Kinoki (Film-eye) group with his second wife, the filmmaker and editor Elizaveta Svilova, and his brother, the cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman. The group issued a series of manifestos, including “WE: Variant of a Manifesto,” published in 1922 in the journal Kinofot, in which they advocated an unstaged, nonnarrative, anti-illusionist, and self-reflexive cinema. In producing the Kino-Pravda (Cinema-Truth) newsreels in 1922–25, the group’s members promoted the concept of faktografiya (factography), the manufacture of innovative aesthetic facts through photomechanical processes. As a society on the cusp of the new media age, the Soviet Union was, in Vertov’s words, a “factory of facts.”[1] In making his films, Vertov relied on montages of such artistic production grounded in the reality of contemporary Soviet life.

    Although not much is known about Vertov’s photographic practice, this small untitled picture from 1930 demonstrates his interest in energy, industrialization, and the building of a socialist society: two smokestacks and an electrical relay pole, shot from a radically low viewpoint that accentuates their verticality. It is possible that the negative for this image was captured by Kaufman, who was the director of photography for a number of Vertov’s films, scouting settings and angles in stills to prepare for the complex compositions in the films; if taken in 1930, it was probably during the production of Vertov’s first sound film, Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbass (Entuziazm: Simfoniia Donbassa), a documentary about the First Five-Year Plan in the Donbass area of Ukraine. But the image does not appear in Enthusiasm and might easily have been taken a few years earlier. An analysis of the photographic paper indicates that its fiber content is typical of paper made in the 1920s. The photograph was Ferrotyping">Ferrotyped during drying, a process that yields a highly glossy surface, thus enhancing detail—a technique commonly used on pictures made for reproduction. Thus Vertov may have intended it for publication.

    A still from Vertov’s 1928 film The Eleventh Year (Odinnadtsatyi)—a film about energy production that takes the electrical relay pole as one of its pivotal motifs—bears a remarkable resemblance to the photograph and was used a year later on the cover of the periodical Sovetskoe kino. Inscribed on the verso of the untitled print are the signature “D. Vertov” (in Cyrillic) and the number 27. If the number refers to 1927, when Vertov shot The Eleventh Year, this lends weight to speculation about an earlier negative date.

    Vertov’s efforts to model creativity on industrial production must be understood not as strictly related to any individual film but rather as grounded in cinema-as-process. What is critical about this picture is that it was squarely aligned with Vertov’s interests in the materiality of both the new Soviet world and avant-garde filmmaking, a philosophy that defined the most productive and groundbreaking years of his practice. 

    —Lee Ann Daffner, Roxana Marcoci

    [1] Dziga Vertov, “The Factory of Facts,” in Annette Michelson, ed., Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 59.

Back / Verso

  • Mount Type No mount
  • Marks and Inscriptions

    Signed in blue ink on sheet verso, top right: Д. Ве́ртов [1]. Inscribed in pencil on sheet verso, left: 27.

    [1] “D. Vertov.”
  • Provenance The artist. Possibly Natan Fedorowskij, Berlin [1]; possibly to Galerie Berinson, Berlin [2]. Priska Pasquer, Photographic Art Consulting, Cologne [3] purchased by Thomas Walther, July 12, 1996 [4]; purchased by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2001.
    [1] Hendrik Berinson, e-mail to Simon Bieling, October 22, 2005.
    [2] Thomas Walther, telephone conversation with Bieling, June 22, 2004.
    [3] Priska Pasquer, Photographic Art Consulting invoice, July 12, 1996.
    [4] Ibid.

Surface

  • Surface Sheen Semireflective
  • Techniques Ferrotyping
  • PTM
    View of the recto of the artwork made using reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) software, which exaggerates subtle surface details and renders the features of the artwork plainly visible. Department of Conservation, MoMA
  • Micro-raking
    Raking-light close-up image, as shot. Area of detail is 6.7 x 6.7 mm. Department of Conservation, MoMA
    Raking-light close-up image, processed. Processing included removal of color, equalization of the histogram, and sharpening, all designed to enhance visual comparison. Department of Conservation, MoMA

Paper Material

  • Format Unknown
  • Weight Double weight
  • Thickness (mm) 0.28
  • UV Fluorescence Recto negative
    Verso negative
  • Fiber Analysis Softwood bleached sulfite 72%
    Softwood bleached sulfite 4%
    Rag 9%
    Bast 15%
  • Material Techniques Developing-out paper
  • XRF

    This work was determined to be a gelatin silver print via X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectrometry.

    The following elements have been positively identified in the work, through XRF readings taken from its recto and verso (or from the mount, where the verso was not accessible):

    • Recto: Al, P, S, Ca, Sr, Ag, Ba
    • Verso: Al, P, S, K, Fe, Sr, Ba

    The graphs below show XRF spectra for three areas on the print: two of the recto—from areas of maximum and minimum image density (Dmax and Dmin)—and one of the verso or mount. The background spectrum represents the contribution of the XRF instrument itself. The first graph shows elements identified through the presence of their characteristic peaks in the lower energy range (0 to 8 keV). The second graph shows elements identified through the presence of their characteristic peaks in the higher energy range (8 to 40 keV).

    Areas examined: Recto (Dmax: black; Dmin: green), Verso or Mount (blue), Background (red)
    Elements identified: Al, P, S, K, Ca, Ag, Ba
    Areas examined: Recto (Dmax: black; Dmin: green), Verso or Mount (blue), Background (red)
    Elements identified: Sr, Ag

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