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[PHOTOMONTAGES OF THE 1930S] Puteshestvie po elektrolampe [i.e. Travel Inside of Electrical Lamp]

Bulanov, N. Lopatin, P.

Item #2259

Moscow; Leningrad: Detizdat, 1937. 24 pp.: ill. 27x20,5 cm. Original illustrated cardboards. Cardboards with signs of wear, one corner skillfully restored. Good internally. Congratulatory inscription on the back of the front cover (1939). Rust on the staples. Overall, a good copy.

Photomontages by Mikhail Makhalov. Very rare.

The original edition from 1937 could be regarded as one of the peaks of photomontage books of the 1930s: Makhalov’s use of retouch on the multi-sized images is inch-perfect, also the whole process of publishing the book reminds more of a cinema process: especially for this the actors of the Moscow children’s theater M. Vakhonina and A. Burova.
Mikhail Makhalov, the photographer before this edition known only for providing the photos for such editions as ‘Tragediynaya Noch’ (1st edition, 1931, by Bezymenskiy, partly designed by Solomon Telingator) and ‘V strane Dzin-Dzin’, this time has created the entire visual part of the edition.
In the times when the majority of Soviet photography was under ideological censorship, this particular edition could be seen as the escape from the propaganda that was dominating the photo-montage of the late 1930s, and allowing room for the experiment.
The story itself shows the changing perspective towards the electricity: if in the 1920s it’s regarded as a somewhat unknown and mysterious bit of technology, by 1937 the children decide to fix the broken father’s lamp themselves and for that decide to decrease. Almost dying in the process however didn’t help them to fix the lamp but the return of the father with a new bulb solved the problem.

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Status: On Hold