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Russian painter, sculptor, designer and photographer, Aleksandr Rodchenko was recognised as one of the most important artists of the Constructivist movement. He studied at the Kazan School of Art (1910-14) and, later, at the Stroganov School in Moscow, where he met Malevich and Tatlin. In 1916, he had a series of drawings in the exhibition, Magazin organised by Tatlin. These works, produced with a ruler and compass, definitively rejected coherent pictorial representation and space. In 1917, he collaborated with several artists on the decoration of the Pittoresque Café in Moscow. His paintings became increasingly determined by geometry such as Non-objective Painting: Black on Black (1918), in which the forms come from the interconnection of different sizes. In the early 20s, he was one of the founder members of INKhKU (Artistic Culture Centre) in Moscow and his interest in photocollage and graphic design had begun. In 1924, he concentrated on photography without artifice, namely portraits of his family and friends. From 1925, he worked for publications such as Tridsat'dnei, Daesh, Ekran rabochei gazety and Sovetskoe foto. In the same year, he started taking exterior photos and also did some sets for films by Leonid Obolenskii and Sergei Komarov. In 1928, he participated in the exhibition Ten Years of Soviet Photography and became chief of a photographic section of the October Group, which he was expelled from four years later. In 1932, he signed a one-year contract with IZOGIZ (the State Institute for Fine Arts Publications) to provide photographs for various Soviet publications and collaborated with Stepanova in the magazine SSSR na Stroike (USSR in Construction). In 1935, he participated in the Exhibition of the Masters of Soviet Photography and, in 1937, in the First Exhibition of the Whole Union Photography both in Moscow.

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