Gender and the Body
In Soviet art, the female nude was highly politicized, and official artists rarely depicted women’s bodies unclothed because of strict censorship. This practice had roots in the culture of pre-revolutionary Russia, which valued modesty. Photographers who created official photography for the Soviet state could not risk making images that might be interpreted as eroticizing the female body, although images of unclothed male bodies were permitted. Those interested in nude photography usually created such images at home and hid them from others because they could not risk being found out, even avoiding developing their film at a commercial lab.
In the 1960s and 1970s, women artists working in amateur photography groups used their unofficial status to pioneer artistic practices that challenged sexist depictions of nude bodies. Self-portraiture by women artists became one way of combating prohibitions against the female nude. Many women artists turned to creating photography about gender and the body to subvert normative tropes of representation that existed under socialist realism and official art. As a result, women artists like Zenta Dzividzinska could not include their photography in public exhibitions, limiting their professional opportunities.
Zenta Dzividzinska (Latvian, 1944–2011)
A prolific photographer, Zenta Dzividzinska was trained as an artist at the Riga Secondary School of Applied Arts in Latvia. She graduated in 1966 and worked professionally as a graphic designer. She had a strong interest in photography and joined the Riga Camera Club in 1965, becoming one of its few female members at the time. During the late 1960s and ’70s, Dzividzinska favored a candid approach. Many of her photographs from that time show women and children informally posed or caught mid-action, as though the photograph was unplanned. Notably, the women in her compositions are not presented as ideal Soviet citizens, or even identifiably Soviet at all. As a nonconformist artist, Dzividzinska rejected the technical precision associated with professional photography, emphasizing instead experimentation with techniques such as light leaks, blurs, and double exposures.
