Elizaveta Ignatovich was a Russian photographer and photojournalist of the 1920s and 1940s. She focused on expressing the class struggle within the Soviet family of the early 1900s through photography. Ignatovich modernized her photography to emphasize/introduce the fast-paced changes and the outlook on life in the Soviet Union. Elizaveta’s work is conflicted with posturing and hypocrisy, and she is against the emphasizing of traditional/logical doctrine.
I chose the artwork/photography, The Fight for the Polytechnic School is the Fight for the Five Year Plan, in which it presents the class awareness through Communist education under Stalin’s Five Year Plan. The Five-Year Plan was the period of development of heavy industry and agriculture in the Soviet Union, but at the cost of severely losing consumer goods. The piece by Elizaveta modernizes Stalin’s Five Year Plan by introducing how Soviet children took adult roles, and how the state focused on controlled factory to socialize urban citizens. In the photo, a factory girl wields a machine to create a new society through heavy industrialization. It expresses Communism, as young children are forced/exposed to an industrial education under the economic/political value. Another takeaway from this poster is that it portrays expressionism of the industrialization time period in the Soviet Union. One can evaluate the children’s facial expression, while working in the factory, defined as a demoralizing and dehumanizing experience during the Five-Year Plan. Children were forced to be occupied in factories with poor working conditions and with high physical demands.
One might be drawn by this piece of photography because of his or her interest in history and how history manifested in the early 1900s; but I was drawn by this piece of work by my interest in photographical artwork, and my interest and value in child development. The world and society should present young children with the best opportunities to succeed and prosper with the embodiment of how young children should be able to freely express themselves. In the 1920s under the Soviet Union and the Five-Year Plan, these children were put into factories to work long hours with poor working conditions than rather be given the opportunity to be educated and freely open themselves to expressing their interests. I find myself thankful to be born in a generation of freedom, but I am saddened by the hard labor young children were born into.
In full evaluation of Elizaveta’s photograph The Fight for the Polytechnic School is the Fight for the Five Year Plan, I find that our generation to be spoiled and to be blessed not to be placed under child labor. I wonder how these Soviet children dealt with such harsh working conditions and how madly driven they were during the Five Year Plan…
Brian, Thanks for sharing this photograph. I have never seen it before. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enlarge the image to see the details of the photograph. The aesthetic requirements that the government placed on artists in the early decades of the Soviet Union are very specific, focused on an aesthetic school called “Social Realism.” You don’t really answer the question about Modernism I asked you to consider; we would need to look closely at the image to see whether it manifests the hyper-realism of Soviet aesthetics or if it’s more Modernist in its aesthetic choices.