Conversatons with the Tax Collector about Poetry

Alexander Rodchenko's design for the back cover of Conversations is a classic example of his genius for photomontage, a technique by which a composite photographic image is formed by combining images from separate photographic sources such as newspapers and magazines. The medium was employed commonly in the 1920s and 1930s for Soviet political propaganda. Rodchenko adapted the author Vladimir Mayakovsky's line from the book-All poetry is a journey into the unknown to represent the author's head, in photographic form, as a world in itself, circled by airplanes. A more conventional portrait of Mayakovsky adorns the front cover. The tax inspector seated at the table is probably the Constructivist poet Aleksei Nikolaevich Chicherin (1889-1960) best known for his book of poetry Change of All (1927).