Experimenting with the Medium
By the time the events of the October Revolution unfolded in Russia in 1917, photography had existed for nearly a century, and the creation of the Soviet Union would come to shape it in significant new ways. Although the avant-garde’s formal innovations were encouraged by the post-revolutionary communist government, by the time the state’s second five-year plan officially launched in 1933, political and aesthetic priorities had shifted. Both the interwar generation and the post-Thaw photographers of the 1960s and ’70s were working within a robust media culture that made it possible to engage with current trends and the history of photography.
Artists and photographers experimented with the material possibilities of the medium, such as photomontage (the cutting and joining of different photographs in one image), hand-tinting with paint, and documenting performance art. Some resisted the very idea that all art should be political, and focused on landscapes and still lifes. The photographers of the 1930s and the late 1980s were separated by time, but in many ways their artistic aims were the same. Throughout the Soviet period, their commitment to photography as a medium allowed them to address both the state’s official ideological imperatives and their own interests in art and representation.
Veronika Laperie (Russian, b. 1966)
Veronika Laperie’s photographic series Broken Archive investigates themes of memory and nostalgia through old found photographs. Using the technique of toning to give her prints the appearance of being yellowed by age, Laperie created photographs that evoke a sense of a long-gone past. During the 1990s, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the transition to a capitalist way of life caused the Russian nation to reflect on its communist past and to create a collective memory of the way life had been before. As the basis for her Broken Archive series, Laperie used found photographs from the 1930s, which date to the era of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
The shattered effect applied to a photograph of a woman posing next to a monument of Vladimir Lenin suggests a sense of a national history that has been fragmented and is on the verge of being forgotten.
Ina Sture (Latvian, b. 1959)
At the end of the 1980s, Ina Sture began to experiment with a variety of techniques—such as double-exposure and toning—to create photographs that were full of color and feeling. Along with photographers such as Violeta Bubelyte (who is also featured in this exhibition), Sture created images that were a reaction against efforts to revive the Pictorialist movement in Russian and Soviet photography at a time when Socialist Realism was increasingly losing relevance for contemporary artists.
Rejecting the styles of “artistic photography,” which aimed to imitate the effects of painting, Sture’s images were driven by abstract experimentation. She layered different photographic effects and selectively applied color to her images by hand in order to produce works that could be understood as distinctly modernist rather than retrospective and traditional. Although Sture’s photographs were dramatic and heavily manipulated, their subject matter was just as important as their formal features.
Maria Snigerevskaya (Russian, b. 1967)
Maria Snigerevskaya is a painter and photographer whose work challenges the disciplinary boundaries of those mediums. In photographs like this still life, Snigerevskaya chooses black-and-white photography to explore subject matter and formal conventions usually associated with painting. By using an analog camera to create a composition reminiscent of nineteenth-century realist painting, Snigerevskaya prompts us to question the assumptions we bring to our different interpretations of painting and photography.
A nonconformist artist in Leningrad (present-day Saint Petersburg, Russia), Snigerevskaya found inspiration in the city’s aesthetic environment—its historic and natural elements—as she combined aspects of realism and nostalgia in her work. Although it prefigures the rise of the Instagram aesthetic by nearly a half-century, the square framing of this photograph looks strikingly contemporary. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine scrolling past it in a grid display on the screen of an iPhone.
