Gustav Klutsis

Gustav Klutsis was a very keen photographer and a memeber of the Constructivist era in the early 20th century. He is most commonly known for his Soviet revolutionaryand Stalinist propaganda which he created with his wife and collaborator Valentina Kulangina.

Klutsis had worked with a wide range of experimental media. He liked to use propaganda as a sign or revolutionary background image. His first prject of note, in 1922, was a series of semi-portable multimedia agitprop kiosks to be placed on the streets in Moscow, integrating “radio-orators”, film screens, and newsprint displays which were all to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Revolution. Like the majority of other Constructivists, he created sculptures, exhibition installations, illustrations and ephemera. 

Klutsis is most primarily known for his photomantages. The names of his and his wifes best known posters, such as “Electrification of the whole Country”, “There can be no Revolutionary theory”, and “Field shock workers into the fight for the socialist reconstruction”, all held fresh, powerful and sometimes even eerie images. For economy reasons, they often sometimes posed themselves into these montages where they were disguised as shock workers or peasants. His dynamic compositions and distortions of scale and space, anged view points and coliding perspectives make them modern. 

Klutsis, like Raoul Haussman, claimed on having created the sub-genre of political photo montage in 1918.