Ex. 1 Read the text. Photographer YeleazarLangman championed the might of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but his innovative approach didn’t quite fit with Socialist realism

Photographer YeleazarLangman championed the might of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, but his innovative approach didn’t quite fit with Socialist realism. The first-ever major exhibition of his work gives viewers an opportunity to fully discover the photographer decried as a “formalist” by Stalinist authorities.

According to Burasovsky, the only major exhibition of Langman’s works was held in the 1930s. It featured his Donbass series and is recreated in its entirety at the Multimedia Arts Museum. The shots capture the daily lives of miners in the Donbass region at the height of the Soviet Union’s mass industrialization. The frame is often tilted a “formalist” tool criticized by Soviet ideologues. Five of the shots ended up as covers for the main Soviet news magazine, Ogonyok.

Viewers also see street scenes of 1930s Moscow, including TverskayaUlitsa illuminated at night, the old MosTorg building with its splashy electric street sign and the parachuting tower in Gorky Park. One evocative image captures an official parade in which the participants sported gas masks.

Other works are portraits, ranging from a schoolgirl writing Stalin’s name on a chalkboard in Kazakhstan to an extreme close-up of artist Alexander Rodchenko.

Born in 1895 in Odessa, Langman studied at the Odessa Art College, followed by Kharkov’s polytechnic institute and musical conservatory. He went through various jobs, including orchestra violinist and head of welding works at a railway construction company, before taking up photography in the late 1920s.

He worked alongside such pioneering Soviet photographers as Rodchenko and Boris Ignatovich, who collaborated in the Oktyabr group. Unlike his peers, however, Langman’s name was nearly forgotten after his death in 1940.

In the final years of his life, Langman didn’t have a permanent residence, staying at the studios of his photographer friends. As a result, his archives were lost. Some of his photographs were preserved by Rodchenko and the satirical writers IlyaIlf and YevgeniPetrov, who were also friends.