The book is dedicated to Soviet avant-garde photography of the 1920s–1930s, which is considered in the context of the transformation of modernism and the formation of the concept of industrial-utilitarian art. Analyzing the aesthetic models developed by avant-garde artists based on photographic techniques (photomontage, instant photography, photo series, photo fresco), the author discovers general patterns concerning the evolution of modernist art in the late 19th - first half of the 20th centuries, its transition to the life-building phase, its relationship with mechanical technologies of representation, as well as its conflict with the official culture of the Stalinist period.