Untitled [Balloon]

Alexander Rodchenko was a revolutionary artist who was interested in art’s role in Russia’s society. He believed that he could communicate new realities to his viewers by taking straight, or un-manipulated, sharp-focus images from unfamiliar viewpoints. In his early career, he sought to create images that obstructed traditional habits of seeing and used odd camera angles, extreme close-ups, multiple exposures, unusual perspectives, and other experimental techniques to render his familiar subjects in new and disorienting ways. He once stated, “In order to educate man to a new longing, everyday objects must be shown with totally unexpected perspectives,” and instructed fellow photographers to “take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view…as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole.” This image exemplifies how Rodchenko’s compositional choices served to transform ordinary subjects, in this case a hot air balloon, into something almost abstract.