Avant-garde photographers generally were not much interested in landscape, a genre associated with pastoral and sublime notions. Rodchenko characteristically found the natural setting of his country house accidental and unorganized: "A bush here, a tree there, a gully, nettles." There seemed nothing to make a photograph from, he wrote, until he looked up to see the trees towering above him "like telephone poles." His raking shot from below proposes vertigo instead of a sylvan calm, a dynamic alternative to the traditional horizons of the landscape view.

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