"Everything in the world exists in order to end up in a photograph." This thought, expressed by Susan Sontag, a well-known American publicist, comes to mind every time you start turning the pages of the album "Photo Manifesto. Contemporary Photography in the USSR". The book was published by the New York gallery Walker, Ursitti & McGinniss (published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York, 1991) for the exhibition of the same name showcasing new Soviet photography in Baltimore (Maryland, USA) at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This album, just like the exhibition itself, resembles a major study of contemporary trends in Soviet photography rather than just a catalog for one of the many exhibitions of unofficial Soviet art, which still arouses interest in the West. "Photo Manifesto provides an excellent opportunity to look at the Land of the Soviets through the eyes of more than fifty contemporary photographers. More precisely, photo artists who, in the era of glasnost, shoot the world the way it was not even allowed to be seen before," — with these words the compilers of the book Joseph Walker, Christopher Ursitti, and Paul McGinniss open it.
In five essays preceding the illustrative part of the book, American and Soviet experts in the field of creative photography Grant Kester, Michelle Botwinick, Irina Racheeva, Valery Stigneev, and Alexander Lavrentiev analyze the current state of Soviet photo art, trying to comprehend the newest Soviet photography taking into account the entire panorama of socio-political events in the USSR. However, this book is not about perestroika. It is about how each photographer tries to creatively express their attitude towards life.
The illustrative part of the book consists of four sections. The Moscow section collects the works of photographers from the "Direct Photography" group, the Leningrad section — from the "TAK" group. The Minsk section is represented mainly by photographers from the associations "Provincia" and "Panorama". The fourth section features photographs by independent authors not united in any informal societies. It is pleasant to note that photographs from Minsk occupy a special place in the book. A photograph by I. Savchenko was used for the exhibition invitation, and a photograph by S. Kozhemyakin "Daughter" was placed on the cover of the album. "Working outside the main trends of Soviet art and being far from its center in Moscow, Minsk photographers have created their own striking cultural autonomy," — with these words the Minsk section begins.
The authors of the book express special gratitude to Valery Lobko for his help in preparing this publication.
The editor of the influential American photo magazine "Afterimage" Grant Kester, the author of the essay "A View from the West", analyzing Soviet photography, focused his attention on the Minsk school of photography. He notes the high technical level and innovative use of many old image processing techniques, finding many analogies in the works of Belarusian and American avant-garde photographers.
The album features photographs by sixteen Minsk authors: Galina Moskaleva, Ivan Petrovich, Vadim Kachan, Vladimir Shakhlevich, Igor Savchenko, Elena Mulyukina, Alexander Sinyak, Sergey Kozhemyakin, Sergey Kovalev, Vladimir Parfenok, Gennady Rodikov, Valery Lobko, Sergey Sukovitsyn, Alexey Pavlyut, Alexey Ilyin, Gennady Slobodsky.
Among V. Shakhlevich's nudes, G. Kester particularly highlights the shots of a naked male figure in a desperate pose in the middle of a desert. The photograph is additionally processed with a toner so that the figure seems to be engulfed in flames or emits something similar to an aura.
Probably, a naked body in a dramatized situation means for V. Shakhlevich, as well as for other photographers, a receptacle of the soul that resists the aggressiveness of the bureaucratic machine seeking to control every step of an individual. Dramatic rituals and various symbolic actions, as a rule, are played out in natural or domestic settings, which provides an ideologically neutral background. For example, the simple decoration of living rooms serves as a background for the series of works "Persona non grata" by V. Parfenok, which arose after the author met young people living in workers' dormitories and existing almost on the margins of life. Multi-color toning of images, generalizing titles, the presence of clearly staged situations alongside documentary shots — all this gives the series a rather parabolic than a documentary character.
The thought of the ubiquitous presence of state surveillance is suggested by a series of photographs by I. Savchenko, showing a stern man in his underwear in profile left and right, and en face in his apartment. A handwritten inscription on the photo proclaims: "Not identified at the Last Judgment" and is accompanied by stamps and a registration number.
Sequences, series, and blocks of photographs are often used by photographers to enhance the social significance of photography, to express their own thought more capaciously, sharply, and deeply than a thought that can be contained in a single "straight" photograph. These additional narrative possibilities of photography are used by many Minsk authors.
For example, S. Kozhemyakin in the sequence "****". Four successive shots of a huge statue of Lenin become darker and darker, increasingly predicting a storm. The frozen monumental body of the giant with a raised hand, strange as it may seem, somewhat resembles the Statue of Liberty.
The obvious contempt of unofficial photographers for the documentary function of photography becomes evident in their desire to enthusiastically process the surface of prints in a wide variety of ways. Almost every photograph in this book is toned, bleached, painted, signed, or scratched. G. Moskaleva's use of "loud" toning is especially effective in the "Elections" series, made at a polling station during the era of one-party democracy. An almost funeral decoration around the ballot box: pots of flowers, a bust of Lenin. The work is enhanced by an ominous dark blue toner. Perhaps the frequent use of such print surface processing techniques by Soviet photographers is associated with an extremely limited choice of photographic materials. But something else is also obvious: each such photograph becomes unique, and the process of its creation turns into an artifact for the author.
Of course, young Soviet photographers are aware of the role of photography both in preserving and in falsifying history. They know well the "plasticity" of historical truth in the hands of a totalitarian state. In particular, in the hands of the Stalinist state, when, for example, repressed political figures were literally erased from official photographs. And at the same time, young Soviet photographers perfectly understand the role of photography in the family archives of ordinary people. That is where so much irony towards historical photography and such an increased interest in old family albums comes from in the works of some photographers.
I. Savchenko in his untitled photographs refers us to the deformations of historical truth. His works consist of fragments of old group photographs, where the faces of some people are either etched out or painted over, and only a thin red snake connects these gaping voids.
G. Moskaleva and S. Kozhemyakin made a series of works using photographs from family albums. In the "Museum of Military Glory" by S. Kozhemyakin, a group of soldiers has gathered around a cannon located, apparently, in some city square. In the first photo, the soldiers take various standard poses, and in the last one, exhausted, they fall onto and under the cannon, creating a parody of a landscape after a battle... Creative photography in the Soviet Union, more than any other art form, feels (and even in recent times!) the absence of any social support. Such a state of affairs is hard to imagine for a Western person accustomed to an abundance of photo magazines, books, galleries, schools, agencies, and collectors. In the Soviet Union, photography is still not perceived as a special art form with its own laws of development. And what is even more surprising is what was revealed during the work on this book: Soviet unofficial photographers, despite their complete isolation, demonstrate in their works many common patterns characteristic of Western postmodernist photographers.
Photographs in the form of sequences, blocks, rows, series, the use of the human body in various dramatized and ritual scenes, the inclusion of autobiographical material, various inscriptions on pictures, understanding the aesthetics of out-of-focus imagery, painting — all these strategic techniques are repeated in the works of contemporary American photographers, such as Cindy Sherman, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, John Baldessari, Jim Goldberg, Barbara Kruger, and others. The wide influx of unofficial Soviet art into the US in the era of glasnost (along with "Komandirskie" watches and T-shirts with the inscription "GORBY") also generates new problems.
Will the works of these unofficial artists, photo artists, originally created not for wide consumption, but only for a narrow circle of friends, be included in the international cultural context? Is there a hope that the best examples of this new and interesting material will be classified, cataloged, collected, formatted for exhibition, advertised, and studied by critics and museum specialists? Will they be archived, sold and bought, put up for auction, and finally, widely reproduced? And do we understand that "bringing to light" this material can violate its very essence?
And in general: do we have a chance not to disrupt the microcosm of these semi-open societies of young creators?
Because their sense of solidarity can be replaced by a sense of jealousy and a spirit of competition: who will be the first to break into New York? Who will get the right to a personal exhibition and who will become the Komar and Melamid of this year?
These are the questions G. Kester asks in his essay. However, I want to believe that this book, as well as the entire project of long-term cooperation with the Walker, Ursitti & McGinniss gallery, will only do a good service to those hundreds (and possibly thousands) of bright individuals who work enthusiastically in obscurity, entrusting their most secret thoughts to a sheet of photo paper...