Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]

 Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium... Photograph and be photographed. 
 Only the camera seems to be really capable of describing modern life. 
 Damn it, nobody knows what is beautiful and what is not. They do not understand new things. 
 Don’t try to capture a man in one synthetic portrait, but rather in lots of snapshots taken at different times and in different circumstances! 
 Landscapes, heads and naked women are called artistic photography, while photographs of current events are called press photography. 
 Photography has all the rights, and all the merits, necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time. 
 Photography—the new, rapid, concrete reflector of the world—should surely undertake to show the world from all vantage points, and to develop people’s capacity to see from all sides. (1928) 
 It is said: Rodchenko’s photographs have become a bore: always looking down from above, looking up from below. But everyone has been photographing “from centre to centre” for years... They have taught us, through thousands of years of painting, to see according to the rules of our forefathers. Instead people should be encouraged to see from every point and with every type of lighting. 
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