Photography was introduced as a tool to aid in identifying suspects and prisoners during the mid-nineteenth century, and rapidly gained favor as a means of governance and societal control.
Rodchenko made a series of portraits of poet and revolutionary activist Vladimir Mayakovsky soon after taking up photography in 1924. In this particular image, the visually imposing Mayakovsky is shown in an unmediated frontal view, drained of emotion and staring stonily at the camera. Such unadorned directness had no precedent in ambitious photography, but it clearly evoked the strictly practical world of police photographs. Photography was introduced as a tool to aid in identifying suspects and prisoners during the mid-nineteenth century, and rapidly gained favor as a means of governance and societal control. Here Rodchenko has rejected the look of commercial studio photography—another development of the mid-1800s—in favor of an equally widespread, powerful kind of photographic portraiture deliberately removed from the conventions of traditional painting.