Celebrating art with a radical perspective

St Petersburg-born Alexander Rodchenko was one of the great figures of 20th-century art. Flourishing in the years following the Russian Revolution, first as a painter, designer, sculptor, and working on architecture, then turning photography, he revolutionised the medium. Making strange the familiar became his trademark.

Now, the Hayward Gallery in London's Southbank Centre gives us Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography, the first major show of his photography in the UK and a not-to-be-missed opportunity to see the development of this revolutionary photographer and get an insider's view of life in the early years of the Soviet Union.

Beginning with his sometimes satirical photomontages, moving on to portraits and extraordinary cityscapes, and ending with circus images unpublished until his death in 1956, the show includes some 200 images. On until April 27, it shows an astonishing output from the first two decades of his photography.

Rodchenko, born in 1891, introduced the techniques of photomontage to Russia and his radical idea of design as an integral element in photography continues to influence us today - see, for example, the record covers of Glasgow band Franz Ferdinand.

Among the outright classics on display is his famous 1924 advertising poster for the publishing house Gosizdat. It is the first thing you see in the upper gallery: a striking poster showing the actress Lili Brik shouting out the word Books' in eye-catching graphics, and is based on an equally impressive photographic portrait of her also on show (and on the Hayward's poster).

His friends in the Russian avant-garde were Rodchenko's first portrait subjects. These included Lili, her lover, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, editor of the left-wing arts magazine LEF Rodchenko designed the covers for, and Rodchenko's artist wife Varvara Stepanova.

While some were documentary images, cinematic in quality, some, such as his famous 1924 portrait of his aged mother, were psychological examinations as well as photographic gems. In this apparently simple, yet complex portrait he exploits the natural patterns he observes. Half the frame is taken up by the polka-dot headscarf she is wearing, leaving the focus on the corrugated contours of her face and their echo in the lines of the spectacles she peers through.

Rodchenko is renowned for his pioneering use of bold and unusual camera angles, severe foreshortenings, tilted perspective and surprising close-ups. Thoroughly modernist, he was one of the founders of Russian constructivism, easy to see in his architectural shots but apparent in many others on show here too.

He set himself the task of taking pictures showing objects from points no-one was accustomed to seeing them from. Instance his dynamic shots of buildings and machinery, the Monument to Pushkin, or Fenders and Camshafts from the AMO Automobile Factory series and, for that matter, those parading the Soviet obsession with a healthy body.

Above all, don't miss his iconic Steps (1930) and Girl with a Leica (1934) both taken from diagonal viewpoints, and Fire Escape (With a Man), a dizzying, initially baffling shot taken from underneath the ladder looking up.

He soon was applying his principle of vertical perspective for architecture to photographs of people too. The Pioneer series shows some extraordinary foreshortenings. Made on a visit to a Pioneer camp - the Soviet equivalent of Scouts and Guides - outside Moscow in 1930, three of them - The Pioneer, Pioneer Girl, and Pioneer with a Trumpet - became classics of world photography, but when first published in 1932 were condemned by a regime then under the grip of Stalin.

Pioneer Boy, whose top-lit dome of a head filled the frame, got the worst of it. "We are surprised that comrade Rodchenko wanted to so disfigure the young healthy face of the Pioneer," one complained. The result of this "experiment" was a "terrible distortion" and "the face of a normal person had been transformed into the face of a freak" objectors continued.

"Why does the pioneer look upwards?" they asked. "It is not ideologically correct. Pioneers and the youth of the Komosol must look ahead."

Curator Olga Sviblova, from the museum, the Moscow House of Photography, says the Pioneer pictures show "important elements of Rodchenko: modernism, the diagonal, the very individual point of vision, the very individual portrait". By the 1930s individualism was becoming unthinkable in the Soviet Union. Rodchenko had long balanced artistic concerns with an interest in the social and political climate. But though he had done well under Lenin, including taking commissions for political propaganda, he was condemned by Stalin, one of many out of synch with Stalin's celebratory socialist realism ideology. His Pioneer Girl, for example, did not smile - as required - nor did the frozen faces of the snow-flecked workers in photo-montages made to document the White Sea-Baltic Canal construction.

Rodchenko had chosen in 1933 to go to Karelia to photograph the canal project to escape the hounding he was then receiving in Moscow. Demoralised by constant criticism and on the verge of giving up photography, he was inspired by his three visits to Karelia where he saw people whose fate was far worse than his own - an estimated 25,000 lives were lost in its construction.

The 141-mile long canal was billed as a triumph of Soviet engineering in Russia and abroad, whereas in fact it was the first of Stalin's gulags, built by forced labour - convicts and political prisoners - under armed guard. Twelve prints from the thousands he took for a special edition of the magazine USSR in Construction are in the show. Though his work was heavily censored, they form a deeply moving chronicle of a bitter time.

The Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography at The Hayward, Southbank Centre, was made possible with the support of Roman Abramovich, and is part of Russian ACT NO.4, a celebration of Russian culture including film, music, contemporary art and photography across London from November 2007 until April. Visitors to the Hayward can also go to Laughing in a Foreign Language on until April 13.