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Soviet Avant-Gardes and Socialist Realism

Soviet Avant-Gardes and Socialist Realism Many scholars argue that the history of Soviet photography cannot be extricated from the Soviet Union’s shifting political ideologies. Writing in Russian, Valerii Stigneev has broadly analyzed the chronological progression of Russian and Soviet photography from the nineteenth century until the 1990s, including such developments as photojournalism, the Soviet amateur photography movement, and the continuities and breaks of avant-garde, Socialist Realist, and nonconformist photography.1 Within recent years, scholars writing in English, such as Leah Dickerman, Devin Fore, Aglaya Glebova, Christina Lodder, Margarita Tupitsyn, Erika Wolf, and others have written extensively about the politics of early Soviet photography and its connections to avant-garde art.2 Other scholars have turned their attention to amateur and unofficial photography after the Thaw, including Susan Reid, Jessica Werneke, and Alise Tifentale.3 These scholars show that understanding Soviet photography requires situating it within the context of the Soviet Union’s history and the political forces shaping Soviet life. The history of Soviet photography has traditionally privileged male photographers and nearly systematically excluded everyone else, including women. An early source on Soviet documentary photography, Sergei Morozov and Valerie Lloyd’s 1984 book Soviet Photography: An Age of Realism features the work of nineteen photographers, none of them women.4 Exhibition catalogs and histories focused on women artists have abounded in recent years, but they too frequently showcase only Western art. Such narratives have perpetuated the incorrect implication that women photographers were not involved in shaping the history of photography in the Soviet Union or were minor actors not worthy of mention in official accounts. More recently, feminist scholars have begun to recontextualize the history of Soviet photography through the lens of gender.Out of an awareness of these issues, this article examines the history of Soviet photography through the work of three women photographers from different generations and different Soviet republics: Olga Ignatovich (1905–1984), Valentina Kulagina (1902–1987), and Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011), tracing how these photographers, whose work in photojournalism and art photography spanned from the 1920s through the 1970s, reconciled their oeuvres with the complex—and often competing—legacies of Soviet avant-garde experimentation and Socialist Realism, especially in their choices of subject, form, and means of distribution.Writing about Soviet art in the 1930s, Susan Reid argues that the conditions of the Stalinist state led women artists to operate during a time when “the triumph of conservative aesthetic hierarchies paralleled the restoration of traditional gender roles”.5 Even as Ignatovich, Kulagina, and Dzividzinska shaped the history of photography over decades through their contributions to Soviet journals, exhibitions, and photo clubs, those same institutions “disadvantaged and subordinated women”.6 How they, and other women photographers working in the Soviet Union, navigated these contradictions remains an open question for further scholarly exploration.7 While Kulagina and Ignatovich primarily worked in Moscow during the interwar period, Dzividzinska was of a later generation and started her artistic career in the 1960s, working in Riga. Although Moscow and Leningrad were central hubs for the ‘industry’ of photography, the Baltic republics had a rich history of photographic production. Latvia, especially, had close ties to the other Baltic republics, which contributed to setting it culturally and artistically apart from the Russian republic. During the late Soviet era, the Lithuanian SSR was the only republic to have a photography union dedicated to fine art photography, the LSSR Society of Art Photography (FMD), which represented both professional and amateur photographers.81Women Photographers in the Era of the Avant-Garde and Socialist RealismFrom its beginning, Socialist Realism shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the work of women photographers. Specifically, the ways in which they navigated the changing conditions of photography under Socialist Realism and faced disciplinary and institutional issues, such as the amateur and professional divide and rigid distinctions between official and unofficial photography. These photographers built their careers in a predominantly male field while negotiating their place within the aesthetic and theoretical debates about the role of art and photography in Soviet socialism. To date, scholars disagree about the continuity of avant-garde practices in Soviet art and photography. A major source of contention is the question of whether nonconformist art of the post-Stalin era constitutes a continuation of 1920s and 1930s art (the ‘historical avant-garde’), or a distinct break commonly designated as the ‘second avant-garde’. On one hand, some scholars argue for a unified lineage that supports a theory of avant-garde practices as a continuum that connects the beginning and end of the twentieth century in Soviet art. Meanwhile, others advance the argument that the Soviet Union’s momentous historical events cleave the history of art, and specifically photography, into two politically distinct periods: the first wave of the 1920s and 1930s, and the second wave of the 1970s and 1980s.9 This article enters into these debates by focusing on the individual interventions of women photographers in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1960s. As will be discussed later, collectively, this group of photographers made formal innovations that have been largely overlooked within the histories of photography. Their contributions reveal another history of the avant-garde and Socialist Realism that is often ignored and is still being unearthed by scholars.A common contention in histories of Soviet photography is that it is inextricably linked to Socialist Realism, as either a reaction against, or a continuation of, the official state style. However, the history of photography in the Soviet Union is more nuanced than the well-known formal innovations of avant-garde practitioners such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Arkady Shaikhet’s social reportage, and Aleksandr Zhitomirsky’s satirical photomontage.10 Oftentimes, the self-conception of Soviet photographers—whether professional or amateur—existed at the nexus of official ideological imperatives, material limitations, and aesthetic principles, as Valerii Stigneev has shown.11 This multiplicity had a lasting influence on the development of photography in the Soviet Union, demonstrating the continuity of avant-garde practices under Socialist Realism. Simply reducing Soviet photography to broad categories such as ‘propaganda’ and ‘totalitarian art’, as much post-Soviet scholarship has done, is not only overly simplistic, but actually problematic because it ignores the avant-garde tendencies that persisted long after the 1920s. As the official style of the Soviet Union, Socialist Realism was something like a cultural institution, but its dominance went beyond the mundane edicts of state-sponsored art. The year 1934 marked the historical point when Socialist Realism was decreed as the official style of the Soviet Union, which would last for the remainder of its history until 1991. After Joseph Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw ushered in a new era of cultural reform that lasted between 1956 and 1964. It alleviated some of the repressive mandates of Stalinism, impacting all aspects of political, social, and economic life in the Soviet Union, including photography.12However, Socialist Realism did not prevent photographers from developing their own pictorial styles. As a language of representation, photography was a way to explore creative possibilities ranging from realism to abstraction. Particularly relevant for this discussion are the ways Soviet photographers exercised degrees of autonomy through the manipulation of the camera’s technological variables, such as its depth of field and compositional cropping. Both the interwar generation and the post-Thaw photographers of the 1960s and 1970s were working within a robust media culture that made it possible to engage with then current trends and the history of photography. In looking at these developments, we might wonder why subsequent generations of Soviet photographers engaged with the concerns of their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s, how that period informed photography after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, and what were the uniting factors for both waves of photographers.In the article “ ‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’: Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay”, Aglaya Glebova argues that the avant-garde photography of practitioners such as Rodchenko was marshalled into Stalinist totalitarianism so that “the radically expanded, and seemingly incoherent, visual language of the Soviet avant-garde in the early 1930s could function not only to reinforce, but also potentially to question and attenuate the dictates of the Stalinist state despite largely (albeit not entirely) renouncing its earlier explicit dialecticism”.13 As Glebova demonstrates, the visual language pioneered by the Soviet avant-garde could be manipulated for different ideological ends, vacillating between propaganda for a communist utopia and apologia for authoritarian terror.After the Thaw, photography in the Soviet Union underwent another significant transformation. Jessica Werneke has argued that: “[T]he discourse surrounding Soviet photography in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to determine photography’s role in the post-Stalinist epoch. The expression of that role, of photography as artistic and documentary, normalized avant-garde aesthetics in Thaw era press photography.”14 Werneke connects the techniques of the post-Stalin generation of photographers with those of their avant-garde predecessors. Thus, the legacy of the avant-garde continues, as “the manifestation of these new (or rather, old) creative and expressive elements of photojournalism derived from their reimagining, repurposing, and reinvestigating various avant-garde techniques while simultaneously questioning the relationship between the artistic and journalistic properties of the photograph”.15Certainly, it is indisputable that the people, networks, and collective spirit of the avant-garde continued to exist after the official end of the Soviet avant-garde era. The training and aesthetic sensibilities of photographers who had started their careers during the rise of the post-revolutionary avant-garde carried over into the 1930s and beyond. Even after the institutions of the avant-garde—such as the technical school VKhUTEMAS (Highest Artistic-Technical Workshops) and the critical publication Levyi front iskusstv (Left Front of the Arts or LEF)—were dissolved, many of the individuals who had embodied these apparatuses continued to live and work under Socialist Realism. For the artists and photographers of that generation, the avant-garde was not just a historical moment that abruptly ceased to exist once Socialist Realism was introduced, but what John Roberts has termed “an open-ended research programme”16 that continued to influence their approach to creating photography in tandem with Socialist Realism.2Reportage and Olga IgnatovichPhotography occupied an uncertain ontological position during the 1920s and 1930s. According to Werneke, at that juncture, “photographers struggled to define the relationship between the photographer as an artist and the photographer as a journalist, and likewise the relationship between photography, art, and journalism”.17 As the central debate that defined the 1930s in the history of Soviet photography, the outcome would have a lasting impact in the decades after Stalin’s death. The turn to Socialist Realism was completed by 1937, and with it, any tolerance of formalism and avant-garde methods was abandoned.18 Even the question of who could legitimately call themselves a photographer was up for debate. In Soviet photography, the distinctions between amateur and professional photographers were not always clear-cut. As Erika Wolf discusses in the article “The Soviet Union: From Worker to Proletarian Photography”, the terminology used to refer to practitioners was often in flux due to the shifting politics of the medium, which was reflected in attitudes about class status.19Even as the field of photography was transformed, illustrated journals with large circulations provided a reliable means for its distribution. Soviet citizens increasingly encountered photographs which regularly appeared in mass media publications such as Ogonek (Little Flame), and the newspapers Pravda (Truth), and Izvestiia (News), but the specialized photography magazine Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) was the most important source for both amateur and professional photographers.20 Sovetskoe foto bridged the divide between professional photojournalists and amateur photographers and united them under the umbrella of Soviet photo culture.21 Published monthly (with some exceptions) between 1926 and 1991, it was temporarily out of print from 1946 through 1956.22 It was aimed at a domestic audience, unlike the more expensive and internationally circulated illustrated journal SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction), which was simultaneously published in multiple languages. Sovetskoe foto briefly held a different title between 1931 and 1933, when it was renamed Proletarskoe foto (Proletarian Photo).23 Although the focus on exclusively proletarian photography was short-lived, Sovetskoe foto continued to cater to amateur photographers, especially after the 1950s when cameras became more affordable.24 This was especially true for amateur photographers in the burgeoning photo club movement that began during the Thaw period. Through the decades, the journal was instrumental to the development of a distinctly socialist visual language for both amateur and professional photography that evolved through the epochs of Soviet history. As Daria Panaiotti has demonstrated, in the 1960s and 1970s, these qualities solidified into distinct aesthetic categories that could be readily identified on the pages of the journal, such as reportage, truthfulness, and realness.25In its third issue of 1974, Sovetskoe foto published an unprecedented feature—a roundtable interview with several generations of Moscow-based women photojournalists.26 The interview provides valuable insights into how the women felt about their careers, the photographs they regarded as their best, and the professional challenges they faced. The first page of the article includes a grid of black-and-white portraits of the interviewees along with their names, and the text is interspersed with examples of their photographs (Fig. 1). In the interview, the photographers speak about the challenges of their profession and their most memorable photographs. Olga Ignatovich was one of the nine photographers interviewed. The others were Maia Okushko, Luiza Kalinina, Galina San’ko, Rimma Likhach, Nina Sviridova, Elizaveta Mikulina, Olga Lander, and Galina Kmit. A similar article had appeared in a 1940 issue of the same journal, but it featured only four women photographers: Olga Ignatovich, Elizaveta Mikulina, Elizaveta Ignatovich, and Tat’yana Mayat.27 Of this group, only Olga Ignatovich was included again in the 1974 feature. Between the 1940s and 1970s, the number of women working as photojournalists grew considerably. Although there was no official barrier that hindered women from becoming artists and photographers in the Soviet Union, women photographers nevertheless faced many challenges, as the Sovetskoe foto interviewees reveal.Figure 1First page of the article with portraits of the women photographers who were interviewed. From the first column, top to bottom: Olga Ignatovich, Maia Okushko, Luiza Kalinina, Galina San’ko, Rimma Likhach, Nina Sviridova, Elizaveta Mikulina, Olga Lander, and Galina Kmit. A. Sergeev and N. Parlashkevich, “‘Za kruglym stolom’—zhenshchiny-reportery: o professii i o sebe” (“Behind the ‘Round Table’: Women Reporters—About the Profession and About the Self”), Sovetskoe Foto 3 (1974), 10The Sovetskoe foto interview provides an insightful glimpse at a successful woman photographer reflecting on her long career. Among the initial few women photojournalists in the early Soviet Union, Olga Ignatovich’s professional work as a fotokor (photojournalist) spanned decades, from the 1920s into the 1970s. Beginning in the 1930s, Ignatovich began crafting a practice that combined elements of avant-garde theory and Socialist Realism. Mainly known for her ‘humanistic’ subject matter, her photographs often feature communes, sporting events, athletes, workers, soldiers, and famous Soviet citizens, and regularly appeared in popular photography journals, newspapers, and exhibitions. Ignatovich was the younger sister of Boris Ignatovich (1899–1976), whose career paralleled, but ultimately overshadowed, hers. Along with him and Elizaveta Ignatovich (1903–1983), who was at the time Boris’s wife and Olga’s sister-in-law, Olga was part of the photography collective known as the Ignatovich Brigade. Working together, the Ignatoviches formed a familial-professional group to create their collective photography work. They informally dubbed themselves a ‘brigade’ to signal their shared commitment to the production of Soviet photography. Sharing assignments and equipment, they attributed their work to the Ignatovich Brigade rather than to the individual photographer. In the 1930s, photojournalists often worked in groups, referring to their work arrangement as a ‘brigade’, which utilized the language of industrial labor and shock brigades. The Ignatovich Brigade’s collective practices functioned on overlapping personal and professional levels, and all three were also members of the photography section of the left-leaning art organization known as the Oktiabr’ (October) group, until its dissolution by the government in 1932. It was during this time that Olga Ignatovich established herself as one of the leading photojournalists in the profession, along with her contemporary Elizaveta Mikulina.Although a lesser-known figure in the history of photography, Olga Ignatovich was nevertheless a significant photographer with many publication credits and a career that spanned decades. Her photographs appeared in leading Soviet publications such as the journals Sovetskoe foto, Proletarskoe foto, Sovetskii Soyuz, and many newspapers. Ignatovich began her career in photojournalism working for the daily newspaper Bednota (Poverty), and later photographed for Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow), Komsomol’skaia Pravda (Komsomol Truth), and Ogonek. She was also a frontline photojournalist for the newspaper Za chest’ rodiny (For the Honor of the Motherland) during World War 2, for which she was awarded an Orden Krasnoi Zvezdy (Order of the Red Star) for her service.28 After the war, she worked as a correspondent for Agentstvo pechati Novosti (Novosti Press Agency or APN) and for the publishing house Sovetskii Khudozhnik (Soviet Artist).29Ignatovich began photographing in the late 1920s, initially learning the craft from her brother Boris, with whom she shared supplies and facilities at a time when access to cameras and photo materials was very limited. One of her earliest works from this period is the Kommuna Serp i molot (Hammer and Sickle Commune) series from the late 1920s, which may have appeared in the newspaper Bednota. At the time, it was edited by Boris Ignatovich, who was instrumental in giving his sister an opportunity to photograph for the newspaper. It was this kind of serial photojournalism that launched her career as a professional photographer. In the series, members of the commune go about their daily lives: working on machinery, talking on a telephone, and selecting bread. Using angled viewpoints—from above, close up, and in profile—Ignatovich unites these moments through the kinetic rhythm of their sequencing. The photographs in this series are executed in a style like that of Boris Ignatovich and Aleksandr Rodchenko during the late 1920s, which was denounced in the early 1930s for its formalism and similarity to Western modernism. Unlike many of her avant-garde colleagues who faced professional and personal persecution, Ignatovich was able to continue working through the 1930s, and even applied her aesthetic sensibilities to war photography.To a certain extent, the lack of professional and historical recognition Olga Ignatovich has received may be attributed to the loss and destruction of large parts of her oeuvre. According to Ignatovich herself, a major portion of her pre-war negatives were lost during World War 2.30 For her, the loss of the negatives was a palpable tragedy, as she states in the interview. Remarking on the lost negatives in the destroyed archive, she said: “[E]ach one is living history. Even the ones which, at first glance, do not seem to hold historical value.”31However, some of her most revealing portraits remained, like the one of Soviet revolutionaries Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya and Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, which appeared alongside the interview in Sovetskoe foto.32 Another image, Goal, alternatively known by the title Soccer, a black-and-white photograph taken by Ignatovich of a 1930s soccer game between the Dynamo Moscow and Spartak soccer teams, exemplifies the defining features of Soviet documentary photography during the interwar period (Fig. 2).33 The photograph shows a pivotal moment during a soccer game when a goal is scored by Dynamo’s Mikhail Yakushin. Positioned from a point of view behind the goalkeeper, Spartak’s Anatoly Akimov, the scene is framed from an unusual low vantage-point, through the net material of the goal. Directly behind the ball is the goalkeeper, wearing a flat multi-panel cap and frozen mid-fall, having just missed preventing the ball from going past him into the net. For Ignatovich, capturing this exciting moment was a milestone career achievement, memorable enough to discuss in the interview decades later. Speaking about the significance of this work many years later, she made no distinction between her work of the 1920s, during the era of the Soviet avant-garde, and her later photographs of the 1930s.34 Perhaps for her there was no remarkable difference in how she approached photography during the 1920s and after, under Socialist Realism.Figure 2Olga Ignatovich, Soccer, 1930s. Gelatin silver print on paper. 19.6 × 28.6 cm (7 11/16 × 11 1/4 in.)Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Margarita TupitsynThe photograph was published in the same 1940 issue of Sovetskoe foto35 that also profiled Olga and Elizaveta Ignatovich as emerging women photographers.36 Alongside it also appeared another mid-action shot of a rugby game, in which a rugby player is shown running with the ball while another player tackles him. This kinetic vision of the game shows Olga Ignatovich’s perspective on life under socialism consisting of collective moments of vitality and freedom. Along with her Oktiabr’ colleagues, Ignatovich was committed to a shared visual approach to depicting the Soviet body as physically fit and agile, with representations of sports as visual metaphors of collective strength and power. These crucial early works show the formulation of key formal elements that would come to define Ignatovich’s visual strategy during the era of Stalinism. In these moments, we see her subjects not as solitary vehicles of propaganda or monumental ideological figures, but as reflections of a political will larger than themselves.37 As Soviet culture became more centralized through new cultural institutions developed in the mid-1930s, how photography was practiced—and by whom—transformed the medium.3Photomontage and Valentina KulaginaA few years later at the end of the 1930s, the artist, designer, and photographer Valentina Kulagina began working on a special project for the Soviet state. She had been commissioned to design large photography panels for the pavilions of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), which opened in Moscow on August 1, 1939.38 She was just one of the many recognizable names associated with the project. The exhibition team employed artists, designers, and photographers to design the pavilions dedicated to showcasing the agricultural triumphs of the Soviet republics, and the constructivist artist El Lissitzky designed the main pavilion.39 Soyuz foto (Union Photo), the Soviet photo agency, and a large number of amateur photographers were also involved, submitting thousands of anonymous negatives based on assigned topics that would highlight the agricultural production all over the Soviet Union.40 These images were used by artists and exhibition designers in various forms to illustrate the themes of the exhibition.An experienced artist by the time she worked on the VSKhV project, Kulagina had been educated at VKhUTEMAS in the early 1920s and was already known for her poster designs. She had also been a member of Oktiabr’s photo section, which championed the practice and application of photomontage. In her compositions for the VSKhV exhibition, Kulagina used the technique of photomontage to seamlessly combine photographs of livestock and nature into idealized scenes of agrarian life (Fig. 3).41 Works like Kulagina’s design of a reindeer standing next to caged foxes against a woodland background appeared as large photo murals inside the “Siberia” and “Animal Husbandry” pavilions. Kulagina’s multiplied images of roaming pigs, cows, and horses amid rolling hills and rivers evoke the Soviet Union’s human-led interventions into the land in economic development projects such as collective farming and electrification. These compositions present the natural environment as an unlimited material resource ripe for fulfilling the economic needs of the state, thereby heightening the sense of spectacle occasioned by the exhibition’s grand narrative of agricultural triumph. Work on the exhibition was completed as the Soviet Union began the third Five-Year Plan (1938–1941) during the Stalinist repression of the Great Terror (1937–1938). Kulagina worked on the project while dealing with the aftermath of the sudden arrest and ‘disappearance’ of her professional collaborator and husband, the Latvian artist Gustavs Klucis (1895–1938),42 who was the foremost photomonteur of the Soviet Union during the interwar period.43Figure 3Valentina Kulagina, Pavilion “Siberia” Introductory Hall from the series Designs for Pavilions of VSKhV, 1938. Gelatin silver print on paper. 22.9 × 11.9 cm (9 × 4 11/16 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionKulagina worked on the exhibition from 1938 until 1941, designing photomontages while the exhibition opening was delayed. When Klucis was initially contacted about the exhibition on January 15, 1938, she wondered if he would work on the designs, as she noted in her diary at the time.44 However, these plans never came to be. Klucis was arrested by the NKVD police just two days later, and secretly executed over false accusations of being a member of a Latvian fascist-nationalist organization. Although she attempted to learn what happened to him after the arrest, Kulagina came to accept his death but would not be officially informed of it by the Soviet authorities until many years later. The loss of her husband made her the primary caregiver for their young son and placed her in immediate financial need. Making matters worse, Kulagina’s father was also arrested the following month in February of 1938. As she wrote in her diary in March of 1938: “Basically, I’m the only person in both families who can work right now—if something happens to me, what’s going to become of Edik [Eduard Kulagin] and Mama. There’s no work, just promises.”45 By the end of March of 1938, Kulagina was determined to find work and sought out the VSKhV project, securing an agreement the next month.Commissioned to work primarily on the panels for the Siberia pavilion, most of the designs she created depicted bucolic scenes of collective farming. Through much of 1939, Kulagina was hard at work on the photomontage panels. In her diary, she noted that she completed ten designs for the exhibition, consisting of: “1. Cheliab[insk] Tractor Factory, 2. The Forest, 3. Gold, 4. Bees and Garden, 5. Animal Husbandry, 6. Technical Culture, 7. The Milkmaid, 8. Production of Hemp-based products, 9. Magnitogorsk, 10. Kuznetsk (the Stalin figure).”46 Her work was well-received by the exhibition organizers and Kulagina secured more commissions to create additional montages for the exhibition. On July 4, 1939, she wrote in her diary that several high-ranking officials had visited the in-progress installation of the exhibition halls: “[O]n the 3rd of July we presented the pavilion; [Viacheslav] Molotov, [Nikolai] Bulganin, [Anastas] Mikoyan, [and Andrei] Vyshinsky were in attendance, they praised it highly. My montage has been praised.”47The success of the photomontages rested on their ability to visualize a future Soviet reality that had not yet been realized and to present it in an appealing visual form. In Kulagina’s compositions for the exhibition, the land takes on a central focus with the repeated multiplicity of animals, rivers, and trees conveying a sense of the Soviet soil’s natural bounty. The seamless quality of the montage work gives the compositions a naturalistic feel, as seen in the image of a team of horses standing together on a grass lawn front at a horse farm with an exaggerated billowing white cloud obscuring most of the background behind them (Fig. 4). From a distance, montages like this appear to be documentary photographs because the ‘seams’ where the different cutout photos are joined together can only be seen from careful observation up close. Repetition—a typical photomontage technique—enacts the sense of proliferation in Kulagina’s compositions. In the montages of sheep and pigs, the same identical images are reused, so that they appear to be interchangeable. However, the individual pieces of the montage are less important than the effect of the unified collective whole. An endless abundance of livestock repudiates any accusation of food scarcity. This was, of course, during the same decade in which forced collectivization led to widespread food shortages and famine that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union.48 In this way, the formal techniques of the montage reflect the greater ambitions of Stalinist ideology of the time in which the individual proletarian was subordinate to the socialist collective.Figure 4Valentina Kulagina, Untitled from the series Designs for Pavilions of VSKhV, 1938. Gelatin silver print on paper. 10.6 × 22.2 cm (4 3/16 × 8 3/4 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionThe agricultural exhibition was a monumental spectacle intended to showcase the achievements of the Soviet economy. On the heels of the industrialization and collectivization of the first Five-Year Plan of 1928–1932, which was fulfilled in four years, the exhibition was a way to rationalize the rapid transformation of the Soviet Union to a reluctant domestic public and a skeptical international audience. The mural-sized photographic images inside the pavilions were intended to symbolize the Soviet state’s growing economic wealth, and the compositional techniques of photomontage made it particularly suitable to visually represent the sense of fantastical domination over the land that the pavilion needed to showcase. As Evgeny Dobrenko has argued, “it is not simply that the Soviet state wanted to fool the public into thinking that Soviet agriculture and industry were more productive than in reality they were; the exhibition was designed to use the imagery of abundance to bring real abundance into being”.49 In the context of the exhibition’s aims, photomontage was a tool for creating the illusion of great national prosperity generated from the vast natural resources of the land of the Soviet Union. The large murals designed by Kulagina rested on the reputation of photomontage as an agitational medium for the state, a reputation largely built by Klucis just years earlier.The aesthetic of these photomontages embodied the twin ideals of progress and modernization that the Soviet Union wanted to project with the exhibition. “The basic function of the exhibition was the creation and maintenance of a Soviet identity. The spectator (who was also a participant) was supposed to form a connection, to fuse, with all this abundance, with that ideal life in which the abundance of products and goods for the people’s consumption was contained,” observed Dobrenko.50 Soviet ideology of the 1930s was premised on reconstructing the vast natural resources of its land for the benefit of the state. The VSKhV exhibition is just one manifestation of this vision; the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal earlier in the decade was another.51Rebuilding the landscape into a communist entity was as much an ideological project as an economic one. Soviet logic dictated that increasing agricultural production had to be achieved through a reconfiguring of the land. Thus, the exploitation of nature for the Soviet economy was an essential component of this identity, as Kulagina’s compositions show. Through its mass scale, which included several hundred buildings set on acres of park-land north of Moscow, the exhibition was a way to justify the turbulent reconstruction of the old Imperial order into a modern socialist empire. The sense of splendor evinced by the pavilions was replicated by Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova in their design of the SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction) issue dedicated to the exhibition.The introductory text in the VSKhV issue of SSSR na stroike linked the success of communism with agricultural production, proclaiming that:[T]he labor of the free Soviet people, combined with the wisdom of material science, provides unprecedented results. The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition secures this union. It will further the agriculture of our motherland, which firmly follows the great, world-historical way to communism, to new, even more perfect forms, [and] to new, even greater successes.52This was an era characterized by political policies that ordained the subjugation of nature for economic production. In altering the environment for the needs of the state, the transformation of the wilderness into a communist landscape was lauded as a Soviet achievement. Certainly, the decision of exhibition organizers to foreground photomontage over other mediums and techniques is a significant one.53 Beyond the exhibition’s run in Moscow, photography was an important component of constructing the exhibition’s legacy in Soviet history and spreading its message to the far reaches of the state. Along with ephemera such as guidebooks and maps, other publications were also released to commemorate the exhibition, such as the photobook Svinovodstvo (Pig Breeding), in which Kulagina’s Pig Breeding photomontage appeared uncredited.54Kulagina’s series Designs for the Pavilions of VSKhV is a hybrid of two aesthetic and historical moments of her career: post-revolutionary avant-garde photomontage and the monumental demands of Socialist Realism after 1934. The series occupies an important moment of transition in Kulagina’s trajectory as an artist, in which she applied her vanguard artistic training to a new epoch of Soviet art in order to move forward as a successful state artist.The pavilion photomontages encompass the breadth of Socialist Realism’s multifaceted system of meaning. Avant-garde and Socialist Realist influences were not only present in Kulagina’s late 1930s work, but wholly integrated into her visual language. It is a question of how art and ideology were mutually constitutive in Soviet art, creating a system of meaning in which visual culture and official politics were intertwined. In moving away from naturalism, Kulagina’s photomontages were more comfortably situated in metaphor. In the progression away from the avant-garde focus of the 1920s to the maturation of Socialist Realism as a Soviet style, we might see the agricultural series as being imbued with both forms of expression, signifying not a clean break from one style to another, but rather a continuation of earlier ideals in new form under the conditions of Stalinism.4Zenta Dzividzinska and the Experimental TurnAfter the 1950s, the relationship between photographic culture and the Soviet state began to change. As society transformed, the purpose and status of photography was once again up for debate. Echoing the disagreements in the 1920s, the question centered on representation and realism. In many ways, an awareness of the concerns developed by Soviet photographers in the 1920s and 1930s informed the work of subsequent generations who came of age after World War 2 and began working during the Thaw. As amateur photography grew in popularity in the 1950s, the visual language of unofficial and nonconformist photography was redefined by the political, cultural, and aesthetic changes that were taking place all over the Soviet Union.In this period, photography clubs served as an important, and maybe the primary, entry point into the medium for those who wanted to improve their skills. Clubs provided a space where women could, at least in theory, participate in learning and practicing photography alongside men on an equal footing, although gendered discrimination was not entirely absent. For women in Soviet photography, gender discrimination within official and unofficial institutions presented an obstacle that ran counter to Soviet ideals of social equality. While women could participate in photography both at an amateur and professional level, they still faced issues with obtaining equal access and treatment. In this context, gender and all that came with it was itself another system—along with the system of state art—for women to navigate. In the late Soviet era, the professional experiences of women artists were shaped by these types of power dynamics and systemic inequities. For those who were determined to make art production their career, the obstacles of gendered expectations and politics were inevitable and built into the competitive culture of photography organizations and institutions. However, it was a tangible political advancement of the Soviet state that women were able to work in these professions alongside their male colleagues and receive recognition and compensation for their labor.These were the conditions of Soviet art when the young Latvian artist Zenta Dzividzinska began studying art and photography in the early 1960s. A prolific amateur photographer, she is an understudied but important figure of 1960s and 1970s photography. Dzividzinska was trained as an artist at the Riga Secondary School of Applied Arts in the Latvian SSR. As a student, she had a strong interest in photography and joined the Riga Photo Club in 1965, where she was initially one of the few active female members (along with Māra Brašmane), which was a notable achievement.55 Many of her photographs from that time show women and children informally posed or caught mid-action, as though the photograph was unplanned, such as in her image of a woman leisurely reading a newspaper on a blanket in the grass while a baby sits next to her (Fig. 5). In the photograph, the woman sunbathes in the shade of a tree in a skirt and bra, with her top pulled down to bare her back to the sun, unselfconsciously relaxing in the privacy of a country house yard in a way that she might not do in a more public setting. Dzividzinska’s photographs often depict women in stages of undress and nudity, which became a point of friction with her male peers, since she avoided eroticizing and portraying the female body in ways that conformed to idealized beauty standards for women, especially Soviet women.56 In her approach to photography, Dzividzinska purposefully rejected the technical precision and sharp focus associated with professional photography, instead developing an avant-garde-like interest in the creative possibilities of light leaks, blurs, and double exposures. She also experimented with darkroom techniques such as photograms, photomontage, solarization, and optical distortion. One such example is her 1968 montaged composition Strawberry Field, which shows her nude body from the back with a superimposed figure of a large hawk ready to strike above her as she intently sews a cloth at a sewing machine incongruously set outdoors among a field of leaves (Fig. 6). This allegorical construction engages with the history of photomontage as an avant-garde medium but is also a substantial departure from the politically agitational application of photomontage by earlier predecessors like Kulagina.Figure 5Zenta Dzividzinska, Untitled, 1960s. Gelatin silver print on paper. 12.6 × 17.7 cm (4 15/16 × 6 15/16 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionFigure 6Zenta Dzividzinska, Strawberry Field, 1968. Gelatin silver print on paper. 39.1 × 26.3 cm (15 3/8 × 10 3/8 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionSignificantly, a number of Dzividzinska’s photographs engage with themes of gender and the nude body through portraiture (and frequently self-portraiture). This subject was considered daring for a woman photographer at the time but would have been more taboo in earlier decades. From the 1960s through the 1980s, a common trope in Soviet amateur photography was the depiction of nude young women represented from the perspective of a heterosexual male gaze.57 To escape censorship, such erotic images were often made in a romanticized pictorialist style to evoke fine art connotations and allusions to classical painting. In club settings, women were often the models rather than the photographers. In Dzividzinska’s case, her photographs of the nude body defied both official and unofficial norms of representation. Katrin Kivimaa argues that much of the unofficial photography of female nudes taken by men presented the body in sexualized ways and did not question the problematic nature of such representations.58 Within the culture of photography clubs, photographers like Dzividzinska pioneered artistic practices that challenged sexist depictions of feminine bodies. Works like Dzividzinska’s self-portraits present ways of engaging with individual subjectivity from a female perspective.59 The rejection of Socialist Realist themes and technical perfection are most evident in her self-portraits, which read as feminist in their resistance to glorifying or typecasting herself as a typical Soviet subject.60 Eschewing the by then standard visual conventions of representing Soviet women as idealized heroes and workers,61 she presents herself during moments of leisure in a naturally relaxed and unposed manner that is boldly individualistic. Her self-portrait from 1968 shows her reclining on a sofa, her bare legs taking up most of the frame and obscuring her torso, so that only her head is visible (Fig. 7). Taken herself with the camera positioned close to the ground below her, the camera’s vantage-point has the viewer looking up at her from the side. She wears an anachronistic top hat whose brim she sardonically tips with her fingers while gazing directly at us, her facial expression stoic. The formality of the top hat and her formal gesture seems humorously at odds with her casual pose, and yet the composition conveys a wry provocation through the mix of masculine and feminine signifiers in the top hat and the hem of her striped skirt. Her stoic expression refuses direct emotional engagement, instead reading like a mask and heightening the sense of subversive disguise. At the same time, Dzividzinska’s use of her own body and her slouching posture conveys an ambivalence about the norms of gender expression and appropriate bodily comportment in the Soviet context. Her own intentional exaggerated emphasis on her naked knees and thighs is reminiscent of an earlier art-historical archetype, the Mayer & Pierson photographs of the Countess de Castiglione’s exposed legs (c. 1856–1860), which are similarly deeply coded images.62Figure 7Zenta Dzividzinska, Self-Portrait, 1968. Gelatin silver print on paper. 11.5 × 17 cm (4.5 × 6 11/16 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionFigure 8Zenta Dzividzinska, Untitled, 1965. Gelatin silver print on paper. 17.6 × 11.9 cm (6 15/16 × 4 11/16 in)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionIn the 1960s, as she began studying photography, Dzividzinska initially turned her focus to portraiture. Her photographs from the decade consistently reveal her sense of humor and penchant for the absurd in observing people around her. In an untitled photograph from 1965, two women stand in front of a storefront window where a mannequin head wearing sunglasses is on display (Fig. 8). The sign in the window identifies it as an optical shop, and the two women admire the display of glasses with their backs turned to us. Playing with duality, Dzividzinska captures the reflection of the torso of the woman on the left in the glass of the storefront window, making it look at first glance as though the mannequin head was part of a body. The image has a voyeuristic dimension as we look at the women looking at the mannequin, and the mannequin appears to look out at them. In images like this one, Dzividzinska consistently challenges representations that present women as passive objects seen through a male gaze, instead making us aware of our own desire for spectatorship as passive consumers of these scenes.Still, despite all the changes brought about by the Thaw, the industry of Soviet photography changed slowly. Even in the late 1960s, nonconformist photographers like Zenta Dzividzinska had limited professional options, and for most of her life she worked as a graphic designer. For her, the Riga Photo Club was her main connection to the medium. According to Elena Barkhatova, “Soviet photography in the late 1950s was tightly regimented, fully subservient to the current tasks of the Party, and subject to stringent ideological constraints”.63 Once photography rose to artistic prominence in the Latvian republic during the 1950s,64 the inclusion of photography in official exhibitions required conformity to approved themes and subject matter, a condition that many nonconformist photographers did not want to meet.65 After the 1950s, photojournalism for the state was one of the very limited professional options open to aspiring photographers, including women photographers. Another option was becoming a staff photographer for a government institution such as a factory or museum, but these positions were not recognized within the USSR’s main photojournalism union. Among photographers, these types of jobs were also not considered as prestigious or creatively fulfilling as other types of photography work.Unlike professional organizations, photo clubs were not heavily regulated on their adherence to Socialist Realism and were an environment where nonconformist photography could flourish. Indeed, some amateur photographers had no ideological disagreement with Socialist Realism. From the perspective of the state, photography clubs were regarded as a hobby undertaken by citizens for personal enrichment, but many photographers who joined such clubs had artistic ambitions.66 Foregoing compensation and professional status, many photographers who pursued photography as an art simply chose to work outside of the official system as a way to seek greater freedom of representation without ideological oversight (although with time clubs became more hierarchical in order to manage their members’ activities). As a cultural phenomenon, in the 1960s photo clubs of the Soviet Union formed a network of photographers who were invested in the development of the medium, with some functioning like countercultural incubators of independent photographic culture in the Soviet Union.67In the 1960s and 1970s, photo club culture in the Soviet Union encouraged an experimental approach to photography, which rekindled earlier discourses about photography as a medium of art. Many parallels can be drawn between the avant-garde’s promotion of proletarian photography in the 1920s and the flourishing of amateur photography in the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of photo club culture after the Thaw emulated the worker photography movement of the Soviet Union’s first decades. In this we can see the continuity of practices that Soviet women photographers brought to the medium by adapting avant-garde innovations to Socialist Realism, and later introducing them to nonconformist photography. The photographers Ignatovich, Kulagina, and Dzividzinska adapted to changes in their field and navigated through the challenges of Stalinism and Socialist Realism while engaging with the formal elements and principles of avant-garde aesthetics developed by groups like Oktiabr’. The first generation of the 1920s and 1930s, contemporaries Ignatovich and Kulagina, worked within the state system of official art. By the time photographers of Dzividzinska’s generation began their careers, the relationship of the field to the Soviet state had become more fractured and at times even oppositional, paving the way for the rise of nonconformist photography. As the career trajectories of these photographers show, Soviet women photographers consistently experienced political, social, and professional challenges which were reflected in their approaches to the medium and their often vanguard position within it. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Avant Garde Studies Brill

Soviet Avant-Gardes and Socialist Realism

Journal of Avant Garde Studies , Volume 1 (2): 33 – Aug 1, 2022

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References (29)

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
2589-6369
eISSN
2589-6377
DOI
10.1163/25896377-00102002
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Many scholars argue that the history of Soviet photography cannot be extricated from the Soviet Union’s shifting political ideologies. Writing in Russian, Valerii Stigneev has broadly analyzed the chronological progression of Russian and Soviet photography from the nineteenth century until the 1990s, including such developments as photojournalism, the Soviet amateur photography movement, and the continuities and breaks of avant-garde, Socialist Realist, and nonconformist photography.1 Within recent years, scholars writing in English, such as Leah Dickerman, Devin Fore, Aglaya Glebova, Christina Lodder, Margarita Tupitsyn, Erika Wolf, and others have written extensively about the politics of early Soviet photography and its connections to avant-garde art.2 Other scholars have turned their attention to amateur and unofficial photography after the Thaw, including Susan Reid, Jessica Werneke, and Alise Tifentale.3 These scholars show that understanding Soviet photography requires situating it within the context of the Soviet Union’s history and the political forces shaping Soviet life. The history of Soviet photography has traditionally privileged male photographers and nearly systematically excluded everyone else, including women. An early source on Soviet documentary photography, Sergei Morozov and Valerie Lloyd’s 1984 book Soviet Photography: An Age of Realism features the work of nineteen photographers, none of them women.4 Exhibition catalogs and histories focused on women artists have abounded in recent years, but they too frequently showcase only Western art. Such narratives have perpetuated the incorrect implication that women photographers were not involved in shaping the history of photography in the Soviet Union or were minor actors not worthy of mention in official accounts. More recently, feminist scholars have begun to recontextualize the history of Soviet photography through the lens of gender.Out of an awareness of these issues, this article examines the history of Soviet photography through the work of three women photographers from different generations and different Soviet republics: Olga Ignatovich (1905–1984), Valentina Kulagina (1902–1987), and Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011), tracing how these photographers, whose work in photojournalism and art photography spanned from the 1920s through the 1970s, reconciled their oeuvres with the complex—and often competing—legacies of Soviet avant-garde experimentation and Socialist Realism, especially in their choices of subject, form, and means of distribution.Writing about Soviet art in the 1930s, Susan Reid argues that the conditions of the Stalinist state led women artists to operate during a time when “the triumph of conservative aesthetic hierarchies paralleled the restoration of traditional gender roles”.5 Even as Ignatovich, Kulagina, and Dzividzinska shaped the history of photography over decades through their contributions to Soviet journals, exhibitions, and photo clubs, those same institutions “disadvantaged and subordinated women”.6 How they, and other women photographers working in the Soviet Union, navigated these contradictions remains an open question for further scholarly exploration.7 While Kulagina and Ignatovich primarily worked in Moscow during the interwar period, Dzividzinska was of a later generation and started her artistic career in the 1960s, working in Riga. Although Moscow and Leningrad were central hubs for the ‘industry’ of photography, the Baltic republics had a rich history of photographic production. Latvia, especially, had close ties to the other Baltic republics, which contributed to setting it culturally and artistically apart from the Russian republic. During the late Soviet era, the Lithuanian SSR was the only republic to have a photography union dedicated to fine art photography, the LSSR Society of Art Photography (FMD), which represented both professional and amateur photographers.81Women Photographers in the Era of the Avant-Garde and Socialist RealismFrom its beginning, Socialist Realism shaped, and was in turn shaped by, the work of women photographers. Specifically, the ways in which they navigated the changing conditions of photography under Socialist Realism and faced disciplinary and institutional issues, such as the amateur and professional divide and rigid distinctions between official and unofficial photography. These photographers built their careers in a predominantly male field while negotiating their place within the aesthetic and theoretical debates about the role of art and photography in Soviet socialism. To date, scholars disagree about the continuity of avant-garde practices in Soviet art and photography. A major source of contention is the question of whether nonconformist art of the post-Stalin era constitutes a continuation of 1920s and 1930s art (the ‘historical avant-garde’), or a distinct break commonly designated as the ‘second avant-garde’. On one hand, some scholars argue for a unified lineage that supports a theory of avant-garde practices as a continuum that connects the beginning and end of the twentieth century in Soviet art. Meanwhile, others advance the argument that the Soviet Union’s momentous historical events cleave the history of art, and specifically photography, into two politically distinct periods: the first wave of the 1920s and 1930s, and the second wave of the 1970s and 1980s.9 This article enters into these debates by focusing on the individual interventions of women photographers in the Soviet Union between the 1930s and 1960s. As will be discussed later, collectively, this group of photographers made formal innovations that have been largely overlooked within the histories of photography. Their contributions reveal another history of the avant-garde and Socialist Realism that is often ignored and is still being unearthed by scholars.A common contention in histories of Soviet photography is that it is inextricably linked to Socialist Realism, as either a reaction against, or a continuation of, the official state style. However, the history of photography in the Soviet Union is more nuanced than the well-known formal innovations of avant-garde practitioners such as Aleksandr Rodchenko, Arkady Shaikhet’s social reportage, and Aleksandr Zhitomirsky’s satirical photomontage.10 Oftentimes, the self-conception of Soviet photographers—whether professional or amateur—existed at the nexus of official ideological imperatives, material limitations, and aesthetic principles, as Valerii Stigneev has shown.11 This multiplicity had a lasting influence on the development of photography in the Soviet Union, demonstrating the continuity of avant-garde practices under Socialist Realism. Simply reducing Soviet photography to broad categories such as ‘propaganda’ and ‘totalitarian art’, as much post-Soviet scholarship has done, is not only overly simplistic, but actually problematic because it ignores the avant-garde tendencies that persisted long after the 1920s. As the official style of the Soviet Union, Socialist Realism was something like a cultural institution, but its dominance went beyond the mundane edicts of state-sponsored art. The year 1934 marked the historical point when Socialist Realism was decreed as the official style of the Soviet Union, which would last for the remainder of its history until 1991. After Joseph Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev’s Thaw ushered in a new era of cultural reform that lasted between 1956 and 1964. It alleviated some of the repressive mandates of Stalinism, impacting all aspects of political, social, and economic life in the Soviet Union, including photography.12However, Socialist Realism did not prevent photographers from developing their own pictorial styles. As a language of representation, photography was a way to explore creative possibilities ranging from realism to abstraction. Particularly relevant for this discussion are the ways Soviet photographers exercised degrees of autonomy through the manipulation of the camera’s technological variables, such as its depth of field and compositional cropping. Both the interwar generation and the post-Thaw photographers of the 1960s and 1970s were working within a robust media culture that made it possible to engage with then current trends and the history of photography. In looking at these developments, we might wonder why subsequent generations of Soviet photographers engaged with the concerns of their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s, how that period informed photography after Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, and what were the uniting factors for both waves of photographers.In the article “ ‘No Longer an Image, Not Yet a Concept’: Montage and the Failure to Cohere in Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Gulag Photoessay”, Aglaya Glebova argues that the avant-garde photography of practitioners such as Rodchenko was marshalled into Stalinist totalitarianism so that “the radically expanded, and seemingly incoherent, visual language of the Soviet avant-garde in the early 1930s could function not only to reinforce, but also potentially to question and attenuate the dictates of the Stalinist state despite largely (albeit not entirely) renouncing its earlier explicit dialecticism”.13 As Glebova demonstrates, the visual language pioneered by the Soviet avant-garde could be manipulated for different ideological ends, vacillating between propaganda for a communist utopia and apologia for authoritarian terror.After the Thaw, photography in the Soviet Union underwent another significant transformation. Jessica Werneke has argued that: “[T]he discourse surrounding Soviet photography in the 1950s and 1960s attempted to determine photography’s role in the post-Stalinist epoch. The expression of that role, of photography as artistic and documentary, normalized avant-garde aesthetics in Thaw era press photography.”14 Werneke connects the techniques of the post-Stalin generation of photographers with those of their avant-garde predecessors. Thus, the legacy of the avant-garde continues, as “the manifestation of these new (or rather, old) creative and expressive elements of photojournalism derived from their reimagining, repurposing, and reinvestigating various avant-garde techniques while simultaneously questioning the relationship between the artistic and journalistic properties of the photograph”.15Certainly, it is indisputable that the people, networks, and collective spirit of the avant-garde continued to exist after the official end of the Soviet avant-garde era. The training and aesthetic sensibilities of photographers who had started their careers during the rise of the post-revolutionary avant-garde carried over into the 1930s and beyond. Even after the institutions of the avant-garde—such as the technical school VKhUTEMAS (Highest Artistic-Technical Workshops) and the critical publication Levyi front iskusstv (Left Front of the Arts or LEF)—were dissolved, many of the individuals who had embodied these apparatuses continued to live and work under Socialist Realism. For the artists and photographers of that generation, the avant-garde was not just a historical moment that abruptly ceased to exist once Socialist Realism was introduced, but what John Roberts has termed “an open-ended research programme”16 that continued to influence their approach to creating photography in tandem with Socialist Realism.2Reportage and Olga IgnatovichPhotography occupied an uncertain ontological position during the 1920s and 1930s. According to Werneke, at that juncture, “photographers struggled to define the relationship between the photographer as an artist and the photographer as a journalist, and likewise the relationship between photography, art, and journalism”.17 As the central debate that defined the 1930s in the history of Soviet photography, the outcome would have a lasting impact in the decades after Stalin’s death. The turn to Socialist Realism was completed by 1937, and with it, any tolerance of formalism and avant-garde methods was abandoned.18 Even the question of who could legitimately call themselves a photographer was up for debate. In Soviet photography, the distinctions between amateur and professional photographers were not always clear-cut. As Erika Wolf discusses in the article “The Soviet Union: From Worker to Proletarian Photography”, the terminology used to refer to practitioners was often in flux due to the shifting politics of the medium, which was reflected in attitudes about class status.19Even as the field of photography was transformed, illustrated journals with large circulations provided a reliable means for its distribution. Soviet citizens increasingly encountered photographs which regularly appeared in mass media publications such as Ogonek (Little Flame), and the newspapers Pravda (Truth), and Izvestiia (News), but the specialized photography magazine Sovetskoe foto (Soviet Photo) was the most important source for both amateur and professional photographers.20 Sovetskoe foto bridged the divide between professional photojournalists and amateur photographers and united them under the umbrella of Soviet photo culture.21 Published monthly (with some exceptions) between 1926 and 1991, it was temporarily out of print from 1946 through 1956.22 It was aimed at a domestic audience, unlike the more expensive and internationally circulated illustrated journal SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction), which was simultaneously published in multiple languages. Sovetskoe foto briefly held a different title between 1931 and 1933, when it was renamed Proletarskoe foto (Proletarian Photo).23 Although the focus on exclusively proletarian photography was short-lived, Sovetskoe foto continued to cater to amateur photographers, especially after the 1950s when cameras became more affordable.24 This was especially true for amateur photographers in the burgeoning photo club movement that began during the Thaw period. Through the decades, the journal was instrumental to the development of a distinctly socialist visual language for both amateur and professional photography that evolved through the epochs of Soviet history. As Daria Panaiotti has demonstrated, in the 1960s and 1970s, these qualities solidified into distinct aesthetic categories that could be readily identified on the pages of the journal, such as reportage, truthfulness, and realness.25In its third issue of 1974, Sovetskoe foto published an unprecedented feature—a roundtable interview with several generations of Moscow-based women photojournalists.26 The interview provides valuable insights into how the women felt about their careers, the photographs they regarded as their best, and the professional challenges they faced. The first page of the article includes a grid of black-and-white portraits of the interviewees along with their names, and the text is interspersed with examples of their photographs (Fig. 1). In the interview, the photographers speak about the challenges of their profession and their most memorable photographs. Olga Ignatovich was one of the nine photographers interviewed. The others were Maia Okushko, Luiza Kalinina, Galina San’ko, Rimma Likhach, Nina Sviridova, Elizaveta Mikulina, Olga Lander, and Galina Kmit. A similar article had appeared in a 1940 issue of the same journal, but it featured only four women photographers: Olga Ignatovich, Elizaveta Mikulina, Elizaveta Ignatovich, and Tat’yana Mayat.27 Of this group, only Olga Ignatovich was included again in the 1974 feature. Between the 1940s and 1970s, the number of women working as photojournalists grew considerably. Although there was no official barrier that hindered women from becoming artists and photographers in the Soviet Union, women photographers nevertheless faced many challenges, as the Sovetskoe foto interviewees reveal.Figure 1First page of the article with portraits of the women photographers who were interviewed. From the first column, top to bottom: Olga Ignatovich, Maia Okushko, Luiza Kalinina, Galina San’ko, Rimma Likhach, Nina Sviridova, Elizaveta Mikulina, Olga Lander, and Galina Kmit. A. Sergeev and N. Parlashkevich, “‘Za kruglym stolom’—zhenshchiny-reportery: o professii i o sebe” (“Behind the ‘Round Table’: Women Reporters—About the Profession and About the Self”), Sovetskoe Foto 3 (1974), 10The Sovetskoe foto interview provides an insightful glimpse at a successful woman photographer reflecting on her long career. Among the initial few women photojournalists in the early Soviet Union, Olga Ignatovich’s professional work as a fotokor (photojournalist) spanned decades, from the 1920s into the 1970s. Beginning in the 1930s, Ignatovich began crafting a practice that combined elements of avant-garde theory and Socialist Realism. Mainly known for her ‘humanistic’ subject matter, her photographs often feature communes, sporting events, athletes, workers, soldiers, and famous Soviet citizens, and regularly appeared in popular photography journals, newspapers, and exhibitions. Ignatovich was the younger sister of Boris Ignatovich (1899–1976), whose career paralleled, but ultimately overshadowed, hers. Along with him and Elizaveta Ignatovich (1903–1983), who was at the time Boris’s wife and Olga’s sister-in-law, Olga was part of the photography collective known as the Ignatovich Brigade. Working together, the Ignatoviches formed a familial-professional group to create their collective photography work. They informally dubbed themselves a ‘brigade’ to signal their shared commitment to the production of Soviet photography. Sharing assignments and equipment, they attributed their work to the Ignatovich Brigade rather than to the individual photographer. In the 1930s, photojournalists often worked in groups, referring to their work arrangement as a ‘brigade’, which utilized the language of industrial labor and shock brigades. The Ignatovich Brigade’s collective practices functioned on overlapping personal and professional levels, and all three were also members of the photography section of the left-leaning art organization known as the Oktiabr’ (October) group, until its dissolution by the government in 1932. It was during this time that Olga Ignatovich established herself as one of the leading photojournalists in the profession, along with her contemporary Elizaveta Mikulina.Although a lesser-known figure in the history of photography, Olga Ignatovich was nevertheless a significant photographer with many publication credits and a career that spanned decades. Her photographs appeared in leading Soviet publications such as the journals Sovetskoe foto, Proletarskoe foto, Sovetskii Soyuz, and many newspapers. Ignatovich began her career in photojournalism working for the daily newspaper Bednota (Poverty), and later photographed for Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow), Komsomol’skaia Pravda (Komsomol Truth), and Ogonek. She was also a frontline photojournalist for the newspaper Za chest’ rodiny (For the Honor of the Motherland) during World War 2, for which she was awarded an Orden Krasnoi Zvezdy (Order of the Red Star) for her service.28 After the war, she worked as a correspondent for Agentstvo pechati Novosti (Novosti Press Agency or APN) and for the publishing house Sovetskii Khudozhnik (Soviet Artist).29Ignatovich began photographing in the late 1920s, initially learning the craft from her brother Boris, with whom she shared supplies and facilities at a time when access to cameras and photo materials was very limited. One of her earliest works from this period is the Kommuna Serp i molot (Hammer and Sickle Commune) series from the late 1920s, which may have appeared in the newspaper Bednota. At the time, it was edited by Boris Ignatovich, who was instrumental in giving his sister an opportunity to photograph for the newspaper. It was this kind of serial photojournalism that launched her career as a professional photographer. In the series, members of the commune go about their daily lives: working on machinery, talking on a telephone, and selecting bread. Using angled viewpoints—from above, close up, and in profile—Ignatovich unites these moments through the kinetic rhythm of their sequencing. The photographs in this series are executed in a style like that of Boris Ignatovich and Aleksandr Rodchenko during the late 1920s, which was denounced in the early 1930s for its formalism and similarity to Western modernism. Unlike many of her avant-garde colleagues who faced professional and personal persecution, Ignatovich was able to continue working through the 1930s, and even applied her aesthetic sensibilities to war photography.To a certain extent, the lack of professional and historical recognition Olga Ignatovich has received may be attributed to the loss and destruction of large parts of her oeuvre. According to Ignatovich herself, a major portion of her pre-war negatives were lost during World War 2.30 For her, the loss of the negatives was a palpable tragedy, as she states in the interview. Remarking on the lost negatives in the destroyed archive, she said: “[E]ach one is living history. Even the ones which, at first glance, do not seem to hold historical value.”31However, some of her most revealing portraits remained, like the one of Soviet revolutionaries Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya and Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, which appeared alongside the interview in Sovetskoe foto.32 Another image, Goal, alternatively known by the title Soccer, a black-and-white photograph taken by Ignatovich of a 1930s soccer game between the Dynamo Moscow and Spartak soccer teams, exemplifies the defining features of Soviet documentary photography during the interwar period (Fig. 2).33 The photograph shows a pivotal moment during a soccer game when a goal is scored by Dynamo’s Mikhail Yakushin. Positioned from a point of view behind the goalkeeper, Spartak’s Anatoly Akimov, the scene is framed from an unusual low vantage-point, through the net material of the goal. Directly behind the ball is the goalkeeper, wearing a flat multi-panel cap and frozen mid-fall, having just missed preventing the ball from going past him into the net. For Ignatovich, capturing this exciting moment was a milestone career achievement, memorable enough to discuss in the interview decades later. Speaking about the significance of this work many years later, she made no distinction between her work of the 1920s, during the era of the Soviet avant-garde, and her later photographs of the 1930s.34 Perhaps for her there was no remarkable difference in how she approached photography during the 1920s and after, under Socialist Realism.Figure 2Olga Ignatovich, Soccer, 1930s. Gelatin silver print on paper. 19.6 × 28.6 cm (7 11/16 × 11 1/4 in.)Collection of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Gift of Margarita TupitsynThe photograph was published in the same 1940 issue of Sovetskoe foto35 that also profiled Olga and Elizaveta Ignatovich as emerging women photographers.36 Alongside it also appeared another mid-action shot of a rugby game, in which a rugby player is shown running with the ball while another player tackles him. This kinetic vision of the game shows Olga Ignatovich’s perspective on life under socialism consisting of collective moments of vitality and freedom. Along with her Oktiabr’ colleagues, Ignatovich was committed to a shared visual approach to depicting the Soviet body as physically fit and agile, with representations of sports as visual metaphors of collective strength and power. These crucial early works show the formulation of key formal elements that would come to define Ignatovich’s visual strategy during the era of Stalinism. In these moments, we see her subjects not as solitary vehicles of propaganda or monumental ideological figures, but as reflections of a political will larger than themselves.37 As Soviet culture became more centralized through new cultural institutions developed in the mid-1930s, how photography was practiced—and by whom—transformed the medium.3Photomontage and Valentina KulaginaA few years later at the end of the 1930s, the artist, designer, and photographer Valentina Kulagina began working on a special project for the Soviet state. She had been commissioned to design large photography panels for the pavilions of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV), which opened in Moscow on August 1, 1939.38 She was just one of the many recognizable names associated with the project. The exhibition team employed artists, designers, and photographers to design the pavilions dedicated to showcasing the agricultural triumphs of the Soviet republics, and the constructivist artist El Lissitzky designed the main pavilion.39 Soyuz foto (Union Photo), the Soviet photo agency, and a large number of amateur photographers were also involved, submitting thousands of anonymous negatives based on assigned topics that would highlight the agricultural production all over the Soviet Union.40 These images were used by artists and exhibition designers in various forms to illustrate the themes of the exhibition.An experienced artist by the time she worked on the VSKhV project, Kulagina had been educated at VKhUTEMAS in the early 1920s and was already known for her poster designs. She had also been a member of Oktiabr’s photo section, which championed the practice and application of photomontage. In her compositions for the VSKhV exhibition, Kulagina used the technique of photomontage to seamlessly combine photographs of livestock and nature into idealized scenes of agrarian life (Fig. 3).41 Works like Kulagina’s design of a reindeer standing next to caged foxes against a woodland background appeared as large photo murals inside the “Siberia” and “Animal Husbandry” pavilions. Kulagina’s multiplied images of roaming pigs, cows, and horses amid rolling hills and rivers evoke the Soviet Union’s human-led interventions into the land in economic development projects such as collective farming and electrification. These compositions present the natural environment as an unlimited material resource ripe for fulfilling the economic needs of the state, thereby heightening the sense of spectacle occasioned by the exhibition’s grand narrative of agricultural triumph. Work on the exhibition was completed as the Soviet Union began the third Five-Year Plan (1938–1941) during the Stalinist repression of the Great Terror (1937–1938). Kulagina worked on the project while dealing with the aftermath of the sudden arrest and ‘disappearance’ of her professional collaborator and husband, the Latvian artist Gustavs Klucis (1895–1938),42 who was the foremost photomonteur of the Soviet Union during the interwar period.43Figure 3Valentina Kulagina, Pavilion “Siberia” Introductory Hall from the series Designs for Pavilions of VSKhV, 1938. Gelatin silver print on paper. 22.9 × 11.9 cm (9 × 4 11/16 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionKulagina worked on the exhibition from 1938 until 1941, designing photomontages while the exhibition opening was delayed. When Klucis was initially contacted about the exhibition on January 15, 1938, she wondered if he would work on the designs, as she noted in her diary at the time.44 However, these plans never came to be. Klucis was arrested by the NKVD police just two days later, and secretly executed over false accusations of being a member of a Latvian fascist-nationalist organization. Although she attempted to learn what happened to him after the arrest, Kulagina came to accept his death but would not be officially informed of it by the Soviet authorities until many years later. The loss of her husband made her the primary caregiver for their young son and placed her in immediate financial need. Making matters worse, Kulagina’s father was also arrested the following month in February of 1938. As she wrote in her diary in March of 1938: “Basically, I’m the only person in both families who can work right now—if something happens to me, what’s going to become of Edik [Eduard Kulagin] and Mama. There’s no work, just promises.”45 By the end of March of 1938, Kulagina was determined to find work and sought out the VSKhV project, securing an agreement the next month.Commissioned to work primarily on the panels for the Siberia pavilion, most of the designs she created depicted bucolic scenes of collective farming. Through much of 1939, Kulagina was hard at work on the photomontage panels. In her diary, she noted that she completed ten designs for the exhibition, consisting of: “1. Cheliab[insk] Tractor Factory, 2. The Forest, 3. Gold, 4. Bees and Garden, 5. Animal Husbandry, 6. Technical Culture, 7. The Milkmaid, 8. Production of Hemp-based products, 9. Magnitogorsk, 10. Kuznetsk (the Stalin figure).”46 Her work was well-received by the exhibition organizers and Kulagina secured more commissions to create additional montages for the exhibition. On July 4, 1939, she wrote in her diary that several high-ranking officials had visited the in-progress installation of the exhibition halls: “[O]n the 3rd of July we presented the pavilion; [Viacheslav] Molotov, [Nikolai] Bulganin, [Anastas] Mikoyan, [and Andrei] Vyshinsky were in attendance, they praised it highly. My montage has been praised.”47The success of the photomontages rested on their ability to visualize a future Soviet reality that had not yet been realized and to present it in an appealing visual form. In Kulagina’s compositions for the exhibition, the land takes on a central focus with the repeated multiplicity of animals, rivers, and trees conveying a sense of the Soviet soil’s natural bounty. The seamless quality of the montage work gives the compositions a naturalistic feel, as seen in the image of a team of horses standing together on a grass lawn front at a horse farm with an exaggerated billowing white cloud obscuring most of the background behind them (Fig. 4). From a distance, montages like this appear to be documentary photographs because the ‘seams’ where the different cutout photos are joined together can only be seen from careful observation up close. Repetition—a typical photomontage technique—enacts the sense of proliferation in Kulagina’s compositions. In the montages of sheep and pigs, the same identical images are reused, so that they appear to be interchangeable. However, the individual pieces of the montage are less important than the effect of the unified collective whole. An endless abundance of livestock repudiates any accusation of food scarcity. This was, of course, during the same decade in which forced collectivization led to widespread food shortages and famine that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union.48 In this way, the formal techniques of the montage reflect the greater ambitions of Stalinist ideology of the time in which the individual proletarian was subordinate to the socialist collective.Figure 4Valentina Kulagina, Untitled from the series Designs for Pavilions of VSKhV, 1938. Gelatin silver print on paper. 10.6 × 22.2 cm (4 3/16 × 8 3/4 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionThe agricultural exhibition was a monumental spectacle intended to showcase the achievements of the Soviet economy. On the heels of the industrialization and collectivization of the first Five-Year Plan of 1928–1932, which was fulfilled in four years, the exhibition was a way to rationalize the rapid transformation of the Soviet Union to a reluctant domestic public and a skeptical international audience. The mural-sized photographic images inside the pavilions were intended to symbolize the Soviet state’s growing economic wealth, and the compositional techniques of photomontage made it particularly suitable to visually represent the sense of fantastical domination over the land that the pavilion needed to showcase. As Evgeny Dobrenko has argued, “it is not simply that the Soviet state wanted to fool the public into thinking that Soviet agriculture and industry were more productive than in reality they were; the exhibition was designed to use the imagery of abundance to bring real abundance into being”.49 In the context of the exhibition’s aims, photomontage was a tool for creating the illusion of great national prosperity generated from the vast natural resources of the land of the Soviet Union. The large murals designed by Kulagina rested on the reputation of photomontage as an agitational medium for the state, a reputation largely built by Klucis just years earlier.The aesthetic of these photomontages embodied the twin ideals of progress and modernization that the Soviet Union wanted to project with the exhibition. “The basic function of the exhibition was the creation and maintenance of a Soviet identity. The spectator (who was also a participant) was supposed to form a connection, to fuse, with all this abundance, with that ideal life in which the abundance of products and goods for the people’s consumption was contained,” observed Dobrenko.50 Soviet ideology of the 1930s was premised on reconstructing the vast natural resources of its land for the benefit of the state. The VSKhV exhibition is just one manifestation of this vision; the construction of the White Sea–Baltic Canal earlier in the decade was another.51Rebuilding the landscape into a communist entity was as much an ideological project as an economic one. Soviet logic dictated that increasing agricultural production had to be achieved through a reconfiguring of the land. Thus, the exploitation of nature for the Soviet economy was an essential component of this identity, as Kulagina’s compositions show. Through its mass scale, which included several hundred buildings set on acres of park-land north of Moscow, the exhibition was a way to justify the turbulent reconstruction of the old Imperial order into a modern socialist empire. The sense of splendor evinced by the pavilions was replicated by Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova in their design of the SSSR na stroike (USSR in Construction) issue dedicated to the exhibition.The introductory text in the VSKhV issue of SSSR na stroike linked the success of communism with agricultural production, proclaiming that:[T]he labor of the free Soviet people, combined with the wisdom of material science, provides unprecedented results. The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition secures this union. It will further the agriculture of our motherland, which firmly follows the great, world-historical way to communism, to new, even more perfect forms, [and] to new, even greater successes.52This was an era characterized by political policies that ordained the subjugation of nature for economic production. In altering the environment for the needs of the state, the transformation of the wilderness into a communist landscape was lauded as a Soviet achievement. Certainly, the decision of exhibition organizers to foreground photomontage over other mediums and techniques is a significant one.53 Beyond the exhibition’s run in Moscow, photography was an important component of constructing the exhibition’s legacy in Soviet history and spreading its message to the far reaches of the state. Along with ephemera such as guidebooks and maps, other publications were also released to commemorate the exhibition, such as the photobook Svinovodstvo (Pig Breeding), in which Kulagina’s Pig Breeding photomontage appeared uncredited.54Kulagina’s series Designs for the Pavilions of VSKhV is a hybrid of two aesthetic and historical moments of her career: post-revolutionary avant-garde photomontage and the monumental demands of Socialist Realism after 1934. The series occupies an important moment of transition in Kulagina’s trajectory as an artist, in which she applied her vanguard artistic training to a new epoch of Soviet art in order to move forward as a successful state artist.The pavilion photomontages encompass the breadth of Socialist Realism’s multifaceted system of meaning. Avant-garde and Socialist Realist influences were not only present in Kulagina’s late 1930s work, but wholly integrated into her visual language. It is a question of how art and ideology were mutually constitutive in Soviet art, creating a system of meaning in which visual culture and official politics were intertwined. In moving away from naturalism, Kulagina’s photomontages were more comfortably situated in metaphor. In the progression away from the avant-garde focus of the 1920s to the maturation of Socialist Realism as a Soviet style, we might see the agricultural series as being imbued with both forms of expression, signifying not a clean break from one style to another, but rather a continuation of earlier ideals in new form under the conditions of Stalinism.4Zenta Dzividzinska and the Experimental TurnAfter the 1950s, the relationship between photographic culture and the Soviet state began to change. As society transformed, the purpose and status of photography was once again up for debate. Echoing the disagreements in the 1920s, the question centered on representation and realism. In many ways, an awareness of the concerns developed by Soviet photographers in the 1920s and 1930s informed the work of subsequent generations who came of age after World War 2 and began working during the Thaw. As amateur photography grew in popularity in the 1950s, the visual language of unofficial and nonconformist photography was redefined by the political, cultural, and aesthetic changes that were taking place all over the Soviet Union.In this period, photography clubs served as an important, and maybe the primary, entry point into the medium for those who wanted to improve their skills. Clubs provided a space where women could, at least in theory, participate in learning and practicing photography alongside men on an equal footing, although gendered discrimination was not entirely absent. For women in Soviet photography, gender discrimination within official and unofficial institutions presented an obstacle that ran counter to Soviet ideals of social equality. While women could participate in photography both at an amateur and professional level, they still faced issues with obtaining equal access and treatment. In this context, gender and all that came with it was itself another system—along with the system of state art—for women to navigate. In the late Soviet era, the professional experiences of women artists were shaped by these types of power dynamics and systemic inequities. For those who were determined to make art production their career, the obstacles of gendered expectations and politics were inevitable and built into the competitive culture of photography organizations and institutions. However, it was a tangible political advancement of the Soviet state that women were able to work in these professions alongside their male colleagues and receive recognition and compensation for their labor.These were the conditions of Soviet art when the young Latvian artist Zenta Dzividzinska began studying art and photography in the early 1960s. A prolific amateur photographer, she is an understudied but important figure of 1960s and 1970s photography. Dzividzinska was trained as an artist at the Riga Secondary School of Applied Arts in the Latvian SSR. As a student, she had a strong interest in photography and joined the Riga Photo Club in 1965, where she was initially one of the few active female members (along with Māra Brašmane), which was a notable achievement.55 Many of her photographs from that time show women and children informally posed or caught mid-action, as though the photograph was unplanned, such as in her image of a woman leisurely reading a newspaper on a blanket in the grass while a baby sits next to her (Fig. 5). In the photograph, the woman sunbathes in the shade of a tree in a skirt and bra, with her top pulled down to bare her back to the sun, unselfconsciously relaxing in the privacy of a country house yard in a way that she might not do in a more public setting. Dzividzinska’s photographs often depict women in stages of undress and nudity, which became a point of friction with her male peers, since she avoided eroticizing and portraying the female body in ways that conformed to idealized beauty standards for women, especially Soviet women.56 In her approach to photography, Dzividzinska purposefully rejected the technical precision and sharp focus associated with professional photography, instead developing an avant-garde-like interest in the creative possibilities of light leaks, blurs, and double exposures. She also experimented with darkroom techniques such as photograms, photomontage, solarization, and optical distortion. One such example is her 1968 montaged composition Strawberry Field, which shows her nude body from the back with a superimposed figure of a large hawk ready to strike above her as she intently sews a cloth at a sewing machine incongruously set outdoors among a field of leaves (Fig. 6). This allegorical construction engages with the history of photomontage as an avant-garde medium but is also a substantial departure from the politically agitational application of photomontage by earlier predecessors like Kulagina.Figure 5Zenta Dzividzinska, Untitled, 1960s. Gelatin silver print on paper. 12.6 × 17.7 cm (4 15/16 × 6 15/16 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionFigure 6Zenta Dzividzinska, Strawberry Field, 1968. Gelatin silver print on paper. 39.1 × 26.3 cm (15 3/8 × 10 3/8 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionSignificantly, a number of Dzividzinska’s photographs engage with themes of gender and the nude body through portraiture (and frequently self-portraiture). This subject was considered daring for a woman photographer at the time but would have been more taboo in earlier decades. From the 1960s through the 1980s, a common trope in Soviet amateur photography was the depiction of nude young women represented from the perspective of a heterosexual male gaze.57 To escape censorship, such erotic images were often made in a romanticized pictorialist style to evoke fine art connotations and allusions to classical painting. In club settings, women were often the models rather than the photographers. In Dzividzinska’s case, her photographs of the nude body defied both official and unofficial norms of representation. Katrin Kivimaa argues that much of the unofficial photography of female nudes taken by men presented the body in sexualized ways and did not question the problematic nature of such representations.58 Within the culture of photography clubs, photographers like Dzividzinska pioneered artistic practices that challenged sexist depictions of feminine bodies. Works like Dzividzinska’s self-portraits present ways of engaging with individual subjectivity from a female perspective.59 The rejection of Socialist Realist themes and technical perfection are most evident in her self-portraits, which read as feminist in their resistance to glorifying or typecasting herself as a typical Soviet subject.60 Eschewing the by then standard visual conventions of representing Soviet women as idealized heroes and workers,61 she presents herself during moments of leisure in a naturally relaxed and unposed manner that is boldly individualistic. Her self-portrait from 1968 shows her reclining on a sofa, her bare legs taking up most of the frame and obscuring her torso, so that only her head is visible (Fig. 7). Taken herself with the camera positioned close to the ground below her, the camera’s vantage-point has the viewer looking up at her from the side. She wears an anachronistic top hat whose brim she sardonically tips with her fingers while gazing directly at us, her facial expression stoic. The formality of the top hat and her formal gesture seems humorously at odds with her casual pose, and yet the composition conveys a wry provocation through the mix of masculine and feminine signifiers in the top hat and the hem of her striped skirt. Her stoic expression refuses direct emotional engagement, instead reading like a mask and heightening the sense of subversive disguise. At the same time, Dzividzinska’s use of her own body and her slouching posture conveys an ambivalence about the norms of gender expression and appropriate bodily comportment in the Soviet context. Her own intentional exaggerated emphasis on her naked knees and thighs is reminiscent of an earlier art-historical archetype, the Mayer & Pierson photographs of the Countess de Castiglione’s exposed legs (c. 1856–1860), which are similarly deeply coded images.62Figure 7Zenta Dzividzinska, Self-Portrait, 1968. Gelatin silver print on paper. 11.5 × 17 cm (4.5 × 6 11/16 in.)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionFigure 8Zenta Dzividzinska, Untitled, 1965. Gelatin silver print on paper. 17.6 × 11.9 cm (6 15/16 × 4 11/16 in)Collection of Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet UnionIn the 1960s, as she began studying photography, Dzividzinska initially turned her focus to portraiture. Her photographs from the decade consistently reveal her sense of humor and penchant for the absurd in observing people around her. In an untitled photograph from 1965, two women stand in front of a storefront window where a mannequin head wearing sunglasses is on display (Fig. 8). The sign in the window identifies it as an optical shop, and the two women admire the display of glasses with their backs turned to us. Playing with duality, Dzividzinska captures the reflection of the torso of the woman on the left in the glass of the storefront window, making it look at first glance as though the mannequin head was part of a body. The image has a voyeuristic dimension as we look at the women looking at the mannequin, and the mannequin appears to look out at them. In images like this one, Dzividzinska consistently challenges representations that present women as passive objects seen through a male gaze, instead making us aware of our own desire for spectatorship as passive consumers of these scenes.Still, despite all the changes brought about by the Thaw, the industry of Soviet photography changed slowly. Even in the late 1960s, nonconformist photographers like Zenta Dzividzinska had limited professional options, and for most of her life she worked as a graphic designer. For her, the Riga Photo Club was her main connection to the medium. According to Elena Barkhatova, “Soviet photography in the late 1950s was tightly regimented, fully subservient to the current tasks of the Party, and subject to stringent ideological constraints”.63 Once photography rose to artistic prominence in the Latvian republic during the 1950s,64 the inclusion of photography in official exhibitions required conformity to approved themes and subject matter, a condition that many nonconformist photographers did not want to meet.65 After the 1950s, photojournalism for the state was one of the very limited professional options open to aspiring photographers, including women photographers. Another option was becoming a staff photographer for a government institution such as a factory or museum, but these positions were not recognized within the USSR’s main photojournalism union. Among photographers, these types of jobs were also not considered as prestigious or creatively fulfilling as other types of photography work.Unlike professional organizations, photo clubs were not heavily regulated on their adherence to Socialist Realism and were an environment where nonconformist photography could flourish. Indeed, some amateur photographers had no ideological disagreement with Socialist Realism. From the perspective of the state, photography clubs were regarded as a hobby undertaken by citizens for personal enrichment, but many photographers who joined such clubs had artistic ambitions.66 Foregoing compensation and professional status, many photographers who pursued photography as an art simply chose to work outside of the official system as a way to seek greater freedom of representation without ideological oversight (although with time clubs became more hierarchical in order to manage their members’ activities). As a cultural phenomenon, in the 1960s photo clubs of the Soviet Union formed a network of photographers who were invested in the development of the medium, with some functioning like countercultural incubators of independent photographic culture in the Soviet Union.67In the 1960s and 1970s, photo club culture in the Soviet Union encouraged an experimental approach to photography, which rekindled earlier discourses about photography as a medium of art. Many parallels can be drawn between the avant-garde’s promotion of proletarian photography in the 1920s and the flourishing of amateur photography in the 1960s and 1970s. The emergence of photo club culture after the Thaw emulated the worker photography movement of the Soviet Union’s first decades. In this we can see the continuity of practices that Soviet women photographers brought to the medium by adapting avant-garde innovations to Socialist Realism, and later introducing them to nonconformist photography. The photographers Ignatovich, Kulagina, and Dzividzinska adapted to changes in their field and navigated through the challenges of Stalinism and Socialist Realism while engaging with the formal elements and principles of avant-garde aesthetics developed by groups like Oktiabr’. The first generation of the 1920s and 1930s, contemporaries Ignatovich and Kulagina, worked within the state system of official art. By the time photographers of Dzividzinska’s generation began their careers, the relationship of the field to the Soviet state had become more fractured and at times even oppositional, paving the way for the rise of nonconformist photography. As the career trajectories of these photographers show, Soviet women photographers consistently experienced political, social, and professional challenges which were reflected in their approaches to the medium and their often vanguard position within it.

Journal

Journal of Avant Garde StudiesBrill

Published: Aug 1, 2022

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