I. The most memorable of the early Soviet photographers. His father was a fugitive. He fled the massacre in his Belarusian town in 1915. He fled to the world, deporting Jews to Turkestan and Uzbekistan at the time. In Uzbekistan, he worked for many years in a newspaper called “The Truth of the East”. During World War II, when anti-Semitism reappeared and became stronger, he stepped aside. He was crushed in Stalin’s anti-Semitic wave and lost his job. Resentful and lonely and unhappy, he died of depression in his last years. He left behind situations that reflected the East of the period, Asia, independent, neutral, not fleeing to orientalism.
II. Max Penson (1893-1959), with his realistic socialist photographs, conveyed the modernist, avant-garde appearance of the Soviets. He presented the visuals of collective farms, a structured country, the inclusion of Uzbek women in life, and the disappearance of differences of ethnic origin.
III. Penson slept little. At night, he mostly worked on his photos, and occasionally in the fire he lit in the garden, he labeled the photos of the system as “enemies of the people” and arrested them, which were deleted from the photos, so that there was no evidence.
IV. When the Secret Service stripped him of his photography license, Penson closed the house and took the job of removing the eyes of the people in his old photographs one by one and resettling them. Again and again, eyes and eyes. ✪ ✪
