The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 13, 2025

Vertically oriented, hazy black-and-white photograph looking down from above at a person on the phone at a wall-mounted telephone. The phone box dominates the upper half of the photograph and the person the lower as they lean against the wall with their left arm and hold the phone to their ear with their right.

At the Telephone

1928

Alexander Rodchenko

(Russian, 1891–1956)
Russia, 20th century
gelatin silver print
Image: 13.8 x 8.9 cm (5 7/16 x 3 1/2 in.)
John L. Severance Fund 2007.146
Art © Estate of Alexander Rodchenko/RAO, Moscow /VAGA, New York, NY
Location: Not on view

Description

This photograph was part of a series commissioned to accompany a magazine article enumerating the steps in producing a newspaper. Rodchenko’s images emphasize women’s participation, such as this messenger phoning the editorial office with information for a story. "We must revolutionize our visual reasoning," Rodchenko urged photographers. "Photograph from all viewpoints except ‘from the belly button,’ until they all become acceptable. And the most interesting viewpoints today are those from above down, and from below up and their diagonals." Rodchenko was one of the most important figures in Russian Constructivism, a modernist movement that expressed revolutionary political content through new, equally radical visual approaches.
  • Rodchenko-Stepanova Archives, Moscow
    Howard Schickler, New York, NY
    Private collection, New York, NY
    Wednesday, October 7, 1998
    (Sotheby's, New York, NY, Oct. 7, 1998, no. 351)
    (Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York, NY)
    1998-2007
    David Raymond [b.1979], New York, NY
    2007-
    The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
  • Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E. Hinson, Ian Walker, and Lisa Kurzner. Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography : the David Raymond Collection in the Cleveland Museum of Art. 2014. Reproduced: p. 162; mentioned p. 163; reproduced and mentioned: p. 232.
  • Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (October 19, 2014-January 11, 2015).
  • {{cite web|title=At the Telephone|url=false|author=Alexander Rodchenko|year=1928|access-date=13 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2007.146