Word: odder
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Russia's early photographers were sometimes responsible for distorting reality. Many were foreigners who roamed the gigantic empire seeking ethnographic oddities, the odder the better. Precursors of Soviet socialist realism, these photographers turned real people into "typical specimens" for the fashionable genre pictures of the times. The wandering holy man, the street musician, the Cossack and especially the peasant, in all his scruffy permutations, were persuaded to assume artful poses. One French photographer of the 1880s in Russia was fixated on funny-looking hats, which he set askew on his subjects' heads when it suited his composition...