Significantly,
Borodulin’s formative years as a photographer were possibly
the toughest in the country’s history and certainly in the
history of Soviet photography. It is easy to forget that
these years are still within such recent living memory,
perhaps due to the fact that there were so few photographers
who documented daily life during this period, and because
of the heavy restrictions imposed on them by the authorities.
There are therefore very few photographic images to turn
to from which we can form an impression. Our mental image
of life in Soviet Russia during the 40s and 50s is not nearly
so richly informed as our image of the same photographically-saturated
period of American culture for example. Borodulin’s photographs
give a fascinating insight into this time, not in the socially
aware style of the western “Concerned Photographer”, but
through his formalist approach to the ideologically free
medium of sports photography.
The
exhibition focuses almost exclusively on images of sport,
participants and competitors, parades and the Olympics;
an arena where the photographer was free from state control,
during a time when one of the most established photography
movements in the world came under the heel of the authorities.
The criticism of formalism in the 30s, the battle with cosmopolitanism
and the official state anti-semitism of the 40s led to the
modernist movement being erased from the history of Soviet
Art, leaving many of the most prominent figures of Soviet
photography unemployed or interned. The photographer’s profession
was deemed “unnecessary”, as was the system of photo-education;
and this lead to the closure of the best photography publications.
Thus, no more an art, photography became a tool for propaganda.
It
is all the more impressive that Borodulin’s work still endures
and his vision is so striking at a time when the photographer
came under such stringent control. Even his photograph of
an Olympic diver was criticised for its depiction of the
diver’s rear from behind in mid-dive. It was a minor victory
for the magazine that the image was eventually successfully
printed as a cover, later to become famously celebrated
as “The Flying Ass”. Thus, in sports photography, Borodulin
found himself free to resurrect the formalist principles
of the great photographers of the 20s and 30s. In recent
years Borodulin’s “Parade” was chosen by Bill Clinton as
one of the photographs which hung in the Oval Office. In
contrast to the exuberant, almost louche style and glamour
of much 40s and 50s photography from the west, Borodulin’s
work ultimately celebrates the victory of the individual
over the system. On a more direct level his images of divers,
runners, fencers, rowers, boxers, footballers, swimmers
and athletes of all kinds are some of the most important
sporting photographs of the twentieth century.
