Shaikhet, Arkadi (1898-1959), Russian photojournalist. After service with the Red Army he worked as a photo retoucher in Moscow, then as a photographer with publications like Rabochaya Gazeta and Ogonyok. He celebrated the headlong modernization taking place under the banner of ‘Socialism in One Country’, and contributed to the celebrated photo-essay A Day in the Life of a Moscow Worker (1931). In 1930 he had participated in an exhibition of Soviet photography at the London Camera Club. During the Second World War he was decorated for powerful combat photographs published in Frontovaya Illustratsiya.
Even when Socialist Realism was firmly in the saddle, some of Shaikhet's pictures, like the dynamically composed Kiev Station, Moscow (1936), have a remarkably avant-gardistic feel. However, he was one of the abler members of the Russian Society of Proletarian Photographers (ROPF) that had earlier attacked the ‘formalism’ and ‘Western decadence’ of Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovich (1899-1976), and their foreign mentors, and favoured an essentially naturalistic, person-centred documentary approach.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Morozov, S., and Lloyd, V. (eds.), Soviet Photography: The New Photo-Journalism 1917-1940 (1984)
