Max Penson was a photojournalist who left a unique record of
the Sovietization of his adopted homeland, Uzbekistan. Like many who
suffered from the widespread anti-Semitism of the time, Penson had to
overcome huge obstacles in his work.
For this edition’s Close Up, Bill Kouwenhoven profiles a man whose life was a study in survival.
"There cannot be many masters left who choose a specific terrain
for their work, dedicate themselves to it completely and make it an
integrated part of their personal destiny… It is, for instance,
virtually impossible to speak about the city of Ferghana without
mentioning the omnipresent Penson who traveled all over Uzbekistan with
his camera. His unparalleled photo archives contain material that
enables us to trace a period in the republic's history, year by year
and page by page.” Sergei Eisenstein, 1940.
Born in the Belarusian village of Velizh, the son of a Jewish
bookbinder, Max Penson studied art but by 1915 was forced to flee
anti-Semitic pogroms at the beginning of World War One.
Settling in Tashkent, the capital of the Tsarist province of
Uzbekistan in Central Asia, he taught art in local schools and in 1921,
at the age of 28, won a camera as the result of his teaching abilities.
From then on, he became immersed in photography and followed the rule of “one roll a day.”
Penson learned Uzbek and threw himself into his work as a photographer for the local Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East).
He documented the abrupt transformation of Uzbek society: the
unveiling and education of women, the creation of massive civil
engineering projects, the establishment of the industrialized cotton
industry and the Sovietization of his new home.
His images were distributed by the Soviet news agency, TASS and were included in the legendary 1933 volume USSR Under Construction, edited by Alexander Rodchenko.
He produced art prints of much of his work - his image Uzbek Madonna
received the Grand Prize at the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris -
and he had one solo exhibition of more than three hundred images in
1939 in Tashkent. But his relative isolation prevented him from
becoming as well known as his contemporary Rodchenko.
After 1949, when Stalin purged all Jews from professional life,
Penson - disillusioned and banned from working professionally - burned
many of his prints and negatives.
Penson used various styles. Images of traditional scenes of canal
workers, harvesters, older people, and festivals in a soft Pictorialist
manner, though out of fashion and frowned upon by Soviet authorities,
which lent a quality of timelessness to his subjects.
Using early generation Leica cameras, his images resemble those of
Rodchenko and his contemporaries in Nazi Germany such as Leni
Riefenstahl with their emphasis on mass forms of workers drilling,
soldiers training, and people at group athletic events.
His javelin throwers and tennis players, for all their
"Constructivist" use of camera angles and repeating patterns, do more
than show masses of people in action. They actively portray the new
realities the Soviets intended to show the world.
And, although staged for the cameras, these images of sport allowed
an element of chance to be present. They do not always present an
idealized world so often seen in propaganda pictures of the era.
Penson’s study of art history and painting helped him create
graceful images that served aesthetic and propaganda purposes such as
the woman, with a badge of Lenin on her blouse, reading by a new
electric light illustrating Lenin’s declaration that “Communism is
Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”
Penson’s work recorded the hopes and dreams of the early days of the
Soviet Union and the bitter disappointment of the later Stalin years.
After his suicide in 1959, his archive was nearly destroyed in the
great earthquake that struck Tashkent in 1966. His family rescued more
than 50,000 images and negatives that form the basis of an important
collection that has led to a traveling exhibition and website.
Penson's dedication was legendary. His daughter Dina said that: ''He
was too devoted to his work. He worked from morning to night, and then,
as soon as he got home, he would disappear into his darkroom to print
pictures for the next day's paper.”
Above all, he was a humanist. Once reprimanding his son Miron,
himself a photojournalist, he told his editor at the paper: “My son is
using a flash in his photos very often. Tell him to use his heart
instead....” This is plainly visible in all his images.
Max Penson is the subject of a major retrospective, curated by Olga Sviblova of the Moscow House of Photography, entitled Max Penson (19893-1958) Photographs of Uzbekistan. It is sponsored by Roman Abramovich, at Gilbert Collection, Somerset House, London.
Bill Kouwenhoven
Leni Riefenstahl
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