Alexey Titarenko: Nomenklatura of Signs Photomontages

Working in secret amid the deprivation and censorship of Soviet rule, Alexey Titarenko conceived Nomenklatura of Signs as a way to translate the visual reality of Soviet life into a language that expressed its absurdity. This groundbreaking series of photomontages and photocollages created a hierarchy of symbols that, together, form a nomenclature — or, in Russian, nomenklatura, a term for the system by which government posts were filled in the Soviet Union. In his article “Alexey Titarenko: Nomenklatura of Signs” in the October 2023 issue of Black and White magazine, photography historian and curator George Slade explains: “We commonly understand nomenclature as a system of specialized signs and symbols. Nomenklatura is a Soviet phenomenon addressing what in American culture of the 1960s might be referred to as “the Establishment”—that is, the power brokers and gatekeepers who influence decision-making and socio-economic ascendancy.”

Drawing inspiration from the aesthetics of Kazimir Malevich, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and other artists of the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde, Titarenko captured an uncanny, darkly comic world in which language is controlled and subverted much like the Newspeak of George Orwell’s 1984. Slade writes: “For those of you whose Russian or Cyrillic decoding is a bit rusty, the texts in these images merit translation. ‘Observe cleanliness,’ for one… Other images in the Nomenklatura series take their titles from signs reading: ‘strengthen the world through labor’ and ‘economize electricity,’ banal civic encouragement toward a robust Russian state. Titarenko refers to these as ‘slogans of colossal dimensions.’ Some of the most mundane street signs in the portfolio, featuring T shapes and numbers providing locations of storm drains, are quotidian yet trenchant analogues to the cited Solzhenitsyn passage. When Titarenko’s photographs zoom in on them, as in Backyard with plaques, their utilitarian notations assume a very dark cast. A Russian never quite knew when or where they might disappear into the subterranean worlds of the gulag.”