I begin with a spectacular pair of spectacles and I will end with a pair of spectacles. Even if you have never heard the name Alexander Rodchenko, you may well know his 1924 image of Osip Brik, the husband of Lili Brik, who was the lover of the poet Mayakovsky. Osip Brik was the co-founder of LEF - a magazine whose acronym stands for Levy Front Isskustva, the Leftist Front for the Arts. Rodchenko's iconic image shows these three Cyrillic letters in one lens of Brik's spectacles. Once seen, never forgotten. It is a striking piece of agitprop - propaganda for Brik's magazine and an index of its dedicated leftist vision. It is also subversive - as you would expect from someone whose own sense of artistic self-worth was inseparable from the lens. In effect, Brik, a figure of the avant garde, is sightless in one eye. The obverse of a heroic historical vision is cultural blindness, narrowness, conformity. Rodchenko's image encompasses both - strikingly, ruefully. Brik was persecuted through the 30s by the Soviet authorities. In 1930, Mayakovsky committed suicide. Rodchenko was expelled in 1931 from the October circle of artists, charged with "formalism". I think he could see it coming.
In 1878, photography was a star. In 1878, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge made his series Horse in Motion, which demonstrated that painters - painters as great as Degas - had been getting it wrong. The definitive success of Horse in Motion inaugurated further (semi-prurient) series of naked women and men running and jumping - just in case we were in any doubt about how these locomotive physical tasks were accomplished by men encumbered only by a cache-sex and sometimes not even that. Photography, it seemed, had definitively replaced painting as the medium for accurately representing reality. If mimesis was your aim, photography was the perfect method. In fact, if David Hockney is right in his book Secret Knowledge - and, forget the sentimental art historians, he is - for generations, artists had been surreptitiously using the photographic precursor, the camera obscura, as an aid to draughtsmanship.
However, these artists discovered that the photographic image is a useful guide to proportion and dimension, but niggard of detail. A draughtsman such as Ingres was compelled to augment his image with information acquired by "eyeballing" the sitter directly. The greater depth of focus provided by the 19th-century photographic plate and prolonged exposure provided only a temporary solution. The superiority of the naked eye soon became apparent. It saw more. It saw in cinemascope - a feature the "panoramic" function on modern cameras is meant to approximate - and it saw quasi-microscopically in intimate close-up. The eye is varifocal. The camera is not. If the frayed cuff of an extended sleeve is in focus, the face of the sleeve's owner won't be. The photographer chooses between foreground and background. Film chooses, too, and even a focus-puller can't choose both at once. No sooner had photography deposed painting than its limitations were revealed. It is a perfect example of "The Iron Law of Stardom", formulated by Louis Menand in the New Yorker in 1997, "the law of the three-year limit": "This law dictates that stardom cannot extend for a period greater than three years. There is no penalty for breaking this law, for the simple reason that it is unbreakable." Yes, I know, and Menand knows, too, the obvious objection: "Once a star, always a star, of course - and that's the problem. For stardom is not to be confused with being a star . . . Stardom is the period of inevitability, the time when everything works in a way that makes you think it will work that way for ever." In 1879, the Tay Bridge disaster was commemorated by William McGonagall and recorded photographically. The photographic evidence featured in the inquiry. But the party was almost over. The etymology of the name "photography" means "drawing with light" - but the very difference between photography and drawing is that photography is, finally, mechanical.
By 1880, the jig was up. Larkin's "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" were waiting to put the de facto declension of importance into words. Larkin's title, reeking of anachronism, is an index that, in the 19th century, the verdict was already in and merely waiting for Larkin to clear his throat and find photography guilty - of being prosaic, of being misleadingly literalist: "But o, photography! As no art is, / Faithful and disappointing! That records / Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds, / And will not censor blemishes/ Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards . . ." The point - that photography isn't art - has been waiting, patiently, inertly, since 1880, when the Iron Law of Stardom decreed that photography wasn't inevitable.
You can see this clearly in Rodchenko's question-begging, nervously vaunting credo of October 31 1934, "Photography is an Art": "From being secondary and imitating the etching, painting or carpet" - this is not a mistranslation: carpets were art objects; Gorky showed his collection to Anna Akhmatova - "photography has broken free and embarked on its own path . . . It is growing and establishing its right to the same respect as painting." What are Rodchenko's arguments for equality? One is to be expected from a communist, that photography is "essential and accessible" - accessible as an available technique and something easily read by the viewer. This pious, party-line argument from plebiscites can be discounted.
The other arguments advanced - compositions "that leave Rubens behind", the revelation of the "unknown" (ie undocumented) - can be refuted by example: like "foreshortening that would be impossible in drawings or paintings". It is true that some of Rodchenko's most brilliant photographs depend on the radical dislocation of viewpoint - though nothing like as radical as cubism's unfixed viewpoint that brings sculptural, in-the-round values to the two-dimensionality of painting. Two examples: Pioneer-Trumpeter (1930) and At the Telephone (1928). In the first, we are shown the trumpeter from under his chin. The trumpet is cropped so we see only the mouthpiece and a horseshoe of the brass. The picture is turned to the left about 10 degrees out of the expected vertical norm. Compositionally, it is quietly, subtly echoic: the trumpeter's nostrils, immediately above the mouthpiece, replicate the mouthpiece almost exactly. The line of his right ear is reproduced, upside down, in the collar of his uniform. The horseshoe of the instrument contains a metal loop - which is mirrored in the dark eyes. The woman on the wall telephone is shot from above, dramatically foreshortened, holding an awesome black bakelite exoskeleton and speaking into its periscope. The composition embraces defamiliarisation. Now you don't see it, then you do.
The Russian formalists, including Viktor Shklovsky, who was photographed with Rodchenko, called this technique ostranenie - or making strange. One of the best examples in literature is the opening of Nabokov's King, Queen, Knave, which describes perfectly an example of everyday surrealism - the sensation that the station is leaving the train: "The huge black clock hand is still at rest but is on the point of making its once-a-minute gesture; that resilient jolt will set a whole world in motion. The clock face will slowly turn away, full of despair, contempt, and boredom, as one by one the iron pillars start walking past, bearing away the vault of the station like bland atlantes; the platform will begin to move past, carrying off on an unknown journey cigarette butts, used tickets, flecks of sunlight and spittle . . . " And so, vividly, irrefutably, on - a tour de force, forcing us to reconsider reality. Rodchenko's telephone is made equally strange.
But, of course, there is nothing new here. Consider Degas's Stooping Dancer, Seen from Behind, circa 1877-78, an oil drawing on faded pink paper, dedicated to "mon ami Mathey". The right of the drawing is filled with the ballerina's behind - an unruly thatch, an angular mushroom of petticoats, the stiff scratchy tulle brilliantly captured by Degas's starved brush. No arms are visible. No torso either. It is all arse. The dancer's head is a darker oblong at the upper right of the skirts. The scumbled shape of the tutu, the compositional enigma, is quickly deciphered and read. At first, it might be a mistake, or someone simply trying out a colour to see how it looks. It looks uncomposed, unbeautiful, unformed, a mass of rough brushstrokes.
In the Musée Rodin, there is a drawing (graphite on paper, 1900) of a man bending over backwards - seen from the front, all legs and knees - like a high jumper executing the Fosbury flop which, after the 1968 Olympics, replaced the straddle technique, which had in turn displaced the scissors. At the top of the drawing, you see a phallus, arranged to the viewer's right, limp as a lock of hair. The upper body is invisible. Mid-left, there is a suggestion of head, etiolated in the same way as the head of Degas's stooping dancer. Our pleasure is the pleasure of closure like the end of an epic simile - as the initially uncertain resolves itself.
In other words, photography isn't out-pacing art. It is catching up. It is emulative - of Egon Schiele's Nude With Blue Stockings Bending Forward (1912, pencil and gouache on paper, Leopold Museum, Vienna) in which the coccyx is the summit of the picture. The pose is folded in on itself, a kind of ironic compositional modesty, showing only one scuffed shoe at the bottom right, and three brief quotations of blue stocking - a wry pun in this sensual work, which is all back and vertebrae.
No sooner had painting successfully reasserted its superiority than the motion picture arrived as another threat. Initially, of course, the movies were just as sensitive to charges of artlessness. The early auteurs, like Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, were careful to compose their shots rather than simply point the camera. (You can see why Francis Bacon was later drawn to stills from Eisenstein, such as the bleeding, bespectacled nurse on the Odessa steps in Potemkin.) Rodchenko's photography is quick to assimilate the compositional possibilities of Eisenstein and Vertov. An obvious example is The Stairs (1930), where a woman - just off-centre, plumb in the vertical axis - carries a child up a set of stone steps sloping steeply, dramatically, from top left to bottom right. Only the narrowing perspective of the steps tells the viewer that this isn't Viennese Jugendstil - a deliberately flat, decorative surface, intercut, as in a Klimt painting, with the human form.
Later, as film took hold and enjoyed its own three years of stardom, photography felt constrained to follow. The photographer Philippe Halsman's envy of motion pictures is evident in his kitsch skull composed of nude women - like a Busby Berkeley musical desperately seeking sophistication. Halsman was fascinated by motion: famously, he photographed Marilyn Monroe jumping barefoot for Life and followed it by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in mid-air. Other celebrities jumped on to Halsman's bandwagon, which he explained with the theory of "Jumpology": when asked to jump, celebrities forgot to be celebrities and revealed more of their unguarded selves. Actually, "Jumpology" is a form of filmic emulation, as are Halsman's exercises in photomontage like Dalí Atomicus, where Dalí is in motion, cats are in flight, thrown water is in mid-trajectory and a chair is levitating. All these are examples of photographs that would like to be motion pictures - when they grow up. Compare Rodchenko's boast in 1934: "To say nothing of the double exposure (or dissolve to use the cinematic term) . . ."
In fact, Rodchenko's photographs are as grown up as it gets. If you are looking for obvious composition, his snaps of mass gymnasts exploit natural pattern. Stanley Spencer, painting first world war troops cooking with their skillets for the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere, talked about his composition as an obbligato of bacon rashers. The proper comparison, however, is not Spencer, but Leni Riefenstahl and her dramatic repeats. (At least Rodchenko won't have to face the charges of fascism levelled by Susan Sontag against Riefenstahl's photographs celebrating the beauty of the Nuba. The way Rodchenko photographs communist physical culture isn't glorification. It is aestheticising the obliteration achieved by pattern. Pattern is more important than national prowess.) There is a marvellous photograph, Scierie: Planks of Wood (1931), that is arranged around a single formal template set up by the parted legs of the workmen. The wood being carried leads the eye from centre to top left. The stacked planks on the right carry the eye from centre to right. Everything goes its separate way.
How good is Rodchenko? His most famous photograph is Mother of the Artist (1924). All his considerable gifts are here. Pattern trouvé is there in the half of the composition given over to his mother's tiny polka-dotted headscarf. The line of her nostrils and her overlapping upper lip are another repeat. And this repeat is itself repeated and inverted in each of her eyebrows. She has a polka dot of her own, a circular cyst, on the side of her nose - itself circled by the single lens of her spectacles that Rodchenko permits us to see. The art here is hidden. You have to look for it - because first and last, the photographer is giving you an old woman in her quiddity taking a closer look at something. But there is a message here for us, too. Look. Take a good look. It is a kind of credo. Alexander Rodchenko: Photographer is at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London SE1, from February 7 to April 27. Details: 0871 663 2519; southbankcentre.co.uk/visual-arts