The institutions of American culture have defined Russian photography as a
newborn. On the cover of Aperture's Photostroika: New Soviet Photography
(1989), for example, pink and blue inks surround Antanas Sutkus's Pioneer, a
member of the Soviet youth organization, from the series People of
Lithuania, 1970-85. The frontispiece of Photo Manifesto (1991), edited by
Joseph Walker, Christopher Ursitti, and Paul McGinnis, shows Minsk
photographer Sergei Kozhemyakin's Daughter, a naked infant asleep upon a
Soviet flag, while the cover of Leah Bendavid-Val's Changing Reality: Recent
Soviet Photography (1991) presents an untitled portrait of two wide- eyed
teens, the single image of innocence in Igor Moukhin's series titled The
City.

Photostroika, Photo Manifesto, and Changing Reality are the most recent
book-length publications, edited by American specialists, that deal with
contemporary photography from the nations of the former Soviet Union. (1)
Each was published during the period of the collapse of Soviet authority,
but prior to the disintegration of the Soviet empire. In presenting the
photography of this time as nascent, each participates in the redefinition
of the history of Soviet photography from a distinctly Western perspective.
While it is the goal of this paper to explore the implications of this
perspective, the complicity of Soviet specialists with American authorities
in the process of redefinition must be noted. Indeed, the near-total
disregard of many of Russia's newly self-appointed specialists for the
deeply interwoven histories of Soviet art and politics has been a critical
component in the revisionist positioning of whole groups of artists by
obscuring their material reliance upon the practices of various earlier, and
thus less well-documented, schools of Soviet art.

This is especially true in Photo Manifesto. In many ways similar to the
earliest large-scale, post-perestroika exhibition and publication to present
contemporary Soviet photography to an international audience, Le Comptoir de
la Photographie's Say Cheese! An Insight into Contemporary Soviet
Photography (1988), Photo Manifesto is large and eclectic.(2) In Photo
Manifesto, however, geographic groupings of photographs are surrounded with
authoritative texts by American and Soviet writers. In these texts, Soviet
photography is labeled (Valery Stigneev: "aesthetic of defect," "naive
style," "anonymous photography," "conceptual photography," pp. 63- 65); bound
to the production of artists who worked during the Revolution and World War
II, periods already legitimated by Western art and photographic historians
(Walker, Ursitti, and McGinnis: "The USSR is currently experiencing a time
in many ways similar to the post-revolutionary avant-garde period, " p. 28);
and dissected for evidence of opposition (Grant Kester: "fascination with
the body and state control suggests connections to Foucault's study of the
carceral realm in Discipline and Punish," p. 79). Finally, Photo Manifesto
separates Soviet photographers into three geographic groupings, Minsk,
Leningrad, and Moscow, plus an all-encompassing category, "Independents, " to
which the rest are designated.

The Independents category joins together under a single, politically
misleading heading the conceptual photography of Boris Mihailov, Kharkov,
the symbolist photography of Boris Smelov, Leningrad, and the sentimental
tonalism of Valery Stigneev, Moscow, among numerous others. Significantly,
Mihailov, Smelov, and Stigneev are regarded as the masters of three mutually
exclusive schools of photographic practice, each with his own crowd of
students, critics, and public admirers. In Photo Manifesto, however,
examples of their work are surrounded by similar images by students and
mimics rather than shown as points of origin for several distinct strains of
photographic practice.

This misrepresentation is significant. Subsumed under the category
"Independents," the stylistic differences between the images of Mihailov,
Smelov, and Stigneev are obscured, while the geographic sections of Photo
Manifesto are defined by adherence to a single style. The Moscow section of
Photo Manifesto, for example, is composed entirely of conceptual works by
the Immediate Photography group (about whom I will have more to say
shortly). In Minsk and Leningrad, as well as in Moscow, Photo Manifesto
shows conceptualism as the dominant tendency in contemporary photography. In
fact, only in Kharkov, under the guidance of Boris Mihailov, did
photographic conceptualism actually flourish in Russia. Until the
international recognition of the Immediate Photography group in 1990 made
such an attitude uneconomical, photographers throughout the USSR, including
Moscow, remained hostile to the union of photography with conceptualism.

What, then, are the origins of Russian conceptual photography? Photo
Manifesto's revision, linking the "pioneering" creativity of the
postrevolutionary avant-garde to "the issues of subjectivity and ideology
that have come to dominate current Western art under the rubric of
postmodernism" (Kester, p. 79), obscures a complex history of interaction
between the politics and the practitioners of Soviet photography, of whom
some supported and others resisted the fusion of the medium with ideology.
The very real and well-documented relationship of contemporary Russian
photography to the tradition of humanist photojournalism and the doctrine of
Socialist Realism is denied by this historical revision.[3]

Indeed, most Soviet photographers working in the late 1980s and early 1990s
have been influenced as much by the histories of "amateur" worker
photography and "professional" photojournalism as by the more or less
discreet, more or less repressed experiments of numerous pre-perestroika
artists. In contrast to the revolutionary period, however, when European
Futurism was redefined (and Marinetti, the representative of European
vacuity, was sent packing) by Russian artists, and to the
post-Khruschev/pre-Gorbachev era, when cold war politics prevented such
joint ventures, much of the photography presented in Photo Manifesto
functions exclusively within the fantasy realm of Western commerce. The
Soviet ground upon which, as Ilya Kabakov has noted, conceptualism fell and
flourished, was briefly fertile in the early 1970s, a residue of the
short-lived cultural thaw. The adoption of the "experimental" by Russian
photographers twenty years later, by contrast, has been motivated by the
dual pressures of the Russian economy and the imagined demands of the
Western art market, rather than by any innate tendency of Russian artists.

The development of a minor American market for Soviet conceptual art during
the 1970s was an outgrowth of the U.S./USSR cultural wars of the fifties and
sixties. The goal of "cultural diplomacy" had been to contrast the forms of
creative expression dominant in one nation as more or less enlightened than
those dominant in the other (i.e., abstraction in the United States versus
realism in the Soviet Union) at international expositions.[4] Following the
spectacular repressions of the Manezh event in 1961 and the Bulldozer Show
in 1974,[5] American cultural institutions abandoned the neutral ground of
the "expo" and began to export unofficial Soviet art through an underground
railroad of private dealers and collectors (facilitated, in part, by
employees of the State Department stationed in the USSR). This creative
gesture of cold war politics succeeded in promoting dissident activity and
instigating a keen interest in the Western art market among Soviet artists.

Moscow conceptualism evolved during this period as an attempt by Soviet
artists and intellectuals to establish ties with their peers in Western
Europe and the United States, and to adapt up-to-date aesthetic strategies
to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. In the Sots Art of Vitaly Komar and
Alexander Melamid, for example, the political implications of Pop art were
applied to Soviet culture. New York viewers responded enthusiastically to
presentations of Komar and Melamid's Sots Art at the Ronald Feldman Gallery
in 1976 and 1977, and to group exhibitions of Sots artists curated by
Margarita Tupitsyn for the Semaphore Gallery in 1984 and the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in 1986. By the late 1980s numerous Soviet artists,
recognizing the appeal of Sots Art, had begun to produce Day-Glo Lenins in
volume for the growing number of American visitors to Moscow. In contrast to
the elaborate visual and textual ironies with which the early Moscow
conceptualists engaged their viewers in a critical discourse with Soviet
material culture, the revival of Sots Art in the late 1980s emphasized
popular stereotypes, producing images and objects that caricatured and
diminished Soviet culture.

Russian photography has followed a similar progression. Until the founding
of the Ermitazh group in 1986, the first semiofficial artists' organization
to emerge from legislation permitting cooperatives and "informal
associations," artistic photography existed only as an amateur practice in
the USSR. In most of the Soviet states, photographers wishing to work
professionally were required to become members of the Journalists' Union and
to produce images that conformed to the time-honored standard of " humanist
art." Only in the Baltic states, following the creation of the Society for
Creative Photography in Lithuania in the 1960s, were photographers organized
into state-sponsored photographic unions.[6]

Ermitazh was the first alternative to the Journalists' Union to which
Russian photographers might belong. In 1987 several smaller groups emerged
from Ermitazh, including the December Group and Immediate Photography. Under
the artistic guidance of photographer Andrei Aksyonov, the December Group
enacted and photographically documented elaborate conceptual performances
and games which reflected the randomness and poverty of daily Soviet life.
Following Aksyonov's emigration to Finland in 1989, December regrouped under
Yuri Babitch's leadership as the Readers of the Letter, and refined its
focus on performance.

The membership of the Immediate Photography group included among others
Vladislav Efimov, Sergei Leontiev, Boris Mihailov, Igor Moukhin, Ilya
Piganov, Alexei Shulgin, and Alexander Slyusarev. The two directions
explored by the group, which Viktor Misiano identified as "the immemorial
paradigms of Russian culture," were "the search for truth and faith in
beauty. . . . A moral orientation and a spiritual aestheticism."[7] The
development of these paradigms into distinct aesthetic practices by the
Immediate Photography group in the mid-1980s continues to influence Russian
photography today.

The first paradigm of Russian culture, the search for truth and the moral
orientation of the artist, is exemplified by the early work of Boris
Mihailov of Kharkov and, more recently, by the works of Moscow artist Alexei
Shulgin, both members of Immediate Photography. In his series Luriki, for
example, begun in 1975, Mihailov fused the traditions of the lubok, an
illustrated broadside which made use of bold, energetic colors as easily
readable symbols, with the lurik, a hand-colored postmortem photograph,
employing a shift from pure document to constructed image. Mihailov' s
colorful critique of the photographic invention of memory extended from the
private citizens depicted to their communal society, from the family or
personal history to the history of the Soviet people. Mihailov's Luriki
series, the first strategic use of found materials in contemporary Soviet
photography, illustrates the role of photography in the construction and
perpetuation of Soviet mythology: its refusal to distinguish invention from
reality runs parallel to the official documentary history of the Soviet
people.

Alexei Shulgin began his series Others' Photos in 1987. Employed by a Moscow
architectural firm, Shulgin discovered a vast, forgotten archive of
photographs, ranging from scenes of construction and destruction to
landscapes and touristic souvenirs. Shulgin's appropriation of three hundred
of these images for Others' Photos called into question the role of the
artist and citizen in maintaining the tools of state oppression. Others'
Photos undermine the authority of the state by re-presenting the
photographic depiction of history as an endless series of banalities.

Others' Photos are banal in the sense that they repeat the scenes of
industrial progress that citizens of the former USSR are all too familiar
with. Nevertheless, Others' Photos are evocative in ways that other
documents of Soviet construction, such as Rodchenko's White Sea Canal series
and Max Alpert's Fergana Canal Construction series, are not. In Others'
Photos, images of construction half completed contrast sharply with
Rodchenko's and Alpert's crowded frames. The honorific images produced by
those (and countless other) artists gloss over the subjects of enforced
labor and the mass resettlement of ethnic minorities by means of which the
Soviet state was built. In Others' Photos, the scarred and half-empty frames
of industrial images and the emphatic erasure of personal identity
underscore the great and tragic losses that accompanied the
industrialization of Soviet Russia. The vastness of the unfinished Soviet
project, depicted in ruins, awakens in the viewer a sense of danger that
verges on sublime terror.

Immediate Photography and the December Group brought the intellectual
exercises and metaphysical games of Moscow conceptualism to the amateur
traditions of Soviet photography. Within the historical context of Soviet
photo-journalism, however, these groups appeared as aberrations, and were
largely ignored by Soviet and American cultural authorities. (In Europe,
however, the links between the new photography and Moscow conceptualism were
duly noted. By 1990 exhibitions and publications featuring Soviet conceptual
photography had appeared in Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy,
Austria, and France.)

In 1989 Margarita Tupitsyn posed the question "whether alternative Soviet
art will finally become integrated into international discourse or be doomed
to even further marginalization as an ultimate exotic resort for a libidinal
investment of Western orientalist fantasies and desires."(8) As if in
response, in 1991 the Walker, Ursitti, and McGinnis Gallery's Photo
Manifesto both sponsored and documented the abrupt trend toward mass
production of conceptual imagery by Soviet photographers, an economically
motivated parallel to the production of Sots Art (primarily by Moscow
artists) and of Neoexpressionism (primarily by Leningrad artists), for
American and German consumers respectively, during the same period.

The dominance of "Moscow-centric" conceptualism in Photo Manifesto
illustrates the speed with which Russian provincial photographers adapted to
the imagined demands of market competition. A survey rather than an art
history, Photo Manifesto describes a lineage of moral and physical value
that extends directly from the modernism of Rodchenko to the postmodernism
of contemporary Russian practice. The complex history of Soviet visual
culture is obliterated, and the period from approximately 1930 to 1990
portrayed as a vast period of artless repression. In effect, Soviet
photography is represented as an experiment that, with a few short- lived
innovations, never really happened.

Baltic photography, for example, for thirty years the most significant
creative and political influence upon contemporary Soviet photography, is
absent from Photo Manifesto. Missing, too, are such significant figures in
contemporary Soviet art photography as Gennady Goushchin, who, in the early
1970s, produced Sots Art collages based on paintings by the Peredvizhniki,
Vladimir Jankilevski, whose color still lifes examined the border between
realism and surrealism in daily life, and Igor Makarevich, an early
conceptualist whose many activities included photographic documentation of
the performances of the Collective Action Group.

What distinguishes Photo Manifesto from other recent publications of Soviet
photography, such as Aperture's Photostroika and the Corcoran Gallery' s
Changing Reality, is the degree to which it reworks the conceptual
strategies of Boris Mihailov, Alexei Shulgin, and other members of the
Immediate Photography group whose photographs focused on issues of truth and
the moral orientation of the artist. In fact, however, by 1991 the revival
of Sots Art had exhausted the aesthetic values of conceptualism, and the
Moscow art community had reached a point of crisis and collapse that
paralleled the social and political disintegration of the USSR. In
photography, the sentimental attachment to Moscow conceptualism had been
abandoned in 1990, when Tatiana Salzirn declared the photographic production
of Sots Art an anachronism. In 1991 Boris Mihailov rejected conceptualism to
pursue the series U Zemli, a "pure documentation" of the social and
political situation in the Ukraine.(9) During the same year, Alexei Shulgin
began the series Latent Energy, attaching motors equipped with ultrasonic
detectors to framed archival images. Shulgin's energetic photographs, which
defy both interpretation and reappropriation, spring vigorously into action
as viewers approach and rest again only when they have backed away.

Mihailov's and Shulgin's actions are indicative of a significant, though
largely unreported, transformation in the Russian art scene. Yuri
Leidermann, formerly of the conceptualist group Medical Hermeneutics, has
described this transformation as a return to personal strivings: " If,
before, everyone spoke of collective syndromes, of the collective
schizophrenia of our circle, now talk begins with personal . . .
ambitions."(10) For Mihailov, the transition to documentation was an attempt
to digest personally the enormity of the physical and spiritual demands upon
the Russian people following the breakdown of Soviet authority. Shulgin' s
Latent Energy, too, represents a dramatic revision of the concept of a
shared "genetic code of cultural memory" that informed Others' Photos. (11)
In its defiance of viewer interpretation and reappropriation, Latent Energy
represents a rejection of the communal and a revival of the search for
private, personal truth.

Despite its presence as a subject for books and exhibitions such as Photo
Manifesto, the integration of Soviet art into the international market has
not occurred. The Western response to individual Russian artists, with the
exception of a limited market for works by a small group of Muscovites
active in the 1970s, has been ambivalent at best. In light of this Western
ambivalence, the return of Russian artists to the visual expression of
personal experience suggests a throwing-off of Western subjecthood. Indeed,
far from fulfilling the Western idea of an infantile Soviet practice or a
regression to revolutionary modernism, one sees among numerous Russian
photographers today a return to the second of Viktor Misiano's "immemorial
paradigms" of Russian culture: spiritual aestheticism.

The "faith in beauty" of the Immediate Photography group was no less
pioneering than its moral orientation. Misiano's spiritual aesthete, a
solitary photographer devoted to exploring "the contours of carefully
arranged objects such as mirrors, glassware, and plaster copies of
antiquities" in the obscurity of his or her studio, fittingly describes
Alexander Slyusarev of Moscow, a member of the Immediate Photography group.
Slyusarev began to photograph at age fifteen. In the 1960s and 1970s, like
many other Soviet artists, Slyusarev was deeply influenced by Baltic
photography, and in 1979 his photographs were first presented to the public
in a guest exhibition of the annual photographic festival of the Baltic
republics in Ogre, Latvia, organized by Lithuanian photographer Egons
Spuris. During the 1980s Slyusarev photographed in extensive series,
devoting one to two hundred images to the investigation of each of his
subjects. Although the focus on conceptual photography has obscured his
importance, Slyusarev is recognized by his peers as a central figure in
contemporary Russian photography (fig. 1).

For Slyusarev, as for numerous other Russian artists, photography functions
through the sensuality of vision, signaling the artist's recognition of
objects and spaces as signs of a deeply spiritual interaction with the
world. In photographs by Boris Smelov of Leningrad, the association of
objects and spaces with spiritual culture is illustrated using
transhistorical signs from art and literature. Like Slyusarev, Smelov is
known within Russia as a master of the school of spiritual aestheticism. The
cultural signifiers Smelov employs in his photographs are recognizable
expressions of the resilience of the Russian spirit. In his Man with a
Hatchet (after Raskolnikov), for example, Smelov extends the struggle of
Dostoevsky's protagonist across history to explore the moral hunger of
modern-day Russians (fig. 2).

Like Smelov, Igor Moukhin, another member of the Immediate Photography
group, makes use of cultural signifiers in his photographs. What binds
Moukhin's documentation of Soviet monuments to the photographs of Alexander
Slyusarev is their shared belief that such signifiers are reminders of the
unique and persistent human consciousness that developed in relation to
Soviet political order. Moukhin originated the Monuments series as a tribute
to Lee Friedlander. Following the collapse of Soviet authority, however, the
series acquired the immediacy of a documentary project as the campaign for
public sculpture that was so central to the Communist idea of culture was
abandoned and its artifacts demolished. Moukhin's Monuments explore the
process of cultural self-identification by examining the fractured
signifiers of Soviet authority. They merge the moral orientation of Boris
Mihailov with the spiritual aestheticism of Alexander Slyusarev, using
relics of the recent Soviet past like the pieces of a puzzle to reconstruct
an image of the shattered Russian self (figs. 3, 4).

The representation of contemporary Russian photography as a newborn in Photo
Manifesto and other publications obscures the deep connection of the diverse
practices of contemporary photographers to Russian and Soviet history. The
idea that the fantasized victory of democracy over Communism should include
a reconstruction of the history of Soviet culture according to Western
values diminishes Russian artists, encouraging the replacement of intimate
discourse with mass production of Soviet kitsch for external consumption.
These ideas are antithetical to the goals of contemporary Russian
photography. In truth, what most characterizes Russian photography today is
not the task of deconstructing the Soviet past by assigning blame and
complicity, but rather the reconstruction of Russian national and cultural
values through the identification of signs of truth and of the spiritual
awareness of beauty that can occur even in the midst of repression. Far
indeed from the culture of the state or the marketplace, the revival of
spiritual aestheticism in contemporary Russian photography represents not a
denial of the past, but rather a search through history for moments of
individual creativity and of collective dignity in the face of ongoing
material decay.

Notes

1. Photostroika: New Soviet Photography (New York: Aperture, 1989); Joseph
Walker, Christopher Ursitti, and Paul McGinniss, eds., Photo Manifesto:
Contemporary Photography in the USSR, exh. cat. (New York: Stewart, Tabori
and Chang, 1991); and Leah Bendavid-Val, Changing Reality: New Soviet
Photography, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C.: Starwood Publishing, 1991).

2. The exhibition "Say Cheese!" was organized by the Galerie Marie- Francois
George, Paris, a commercial gallery devoted to sales of contemporary
photography from the former Soviet Union. It was presented in Paris during
the "Mois de la Photo," 1988, and in the United States at the Museum of
Contemporary Photography, Chicago, December 22-February 7, 1990. " Photo
Manifesto" was organized by the Walker, Ursitti, and McGinnis Gallery, New
York, a commercial gallery that deals in Russian art and photography, and
was presented at the Museum for Contemporary Arts, Baltimore, May 19-June
21, 1991.

3. See, for example, Olga Suslova, "Photojournalism in the Soviet Press," in
The Photographic Memory: Press Photography--Twelve Insights, ed. Emile
Meijer and Joop Swart (London: Quiller Press, 1987), 102-15; or Vladislav
Zimenko, The Humanism of Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976).

4. See, for example, Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive:
The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1960).

5. For information on the Manezh event, see John Berger, Art and Revolution
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); and Roy A. Medvedev, Khruschev (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1982). For information on the Bulldozer Show, see Igor
Golomshtok, "The History and Organization of Artistic Life in the Soviet
Union," in Soviet Emigre Artist. s: Life and Work in the USSR and the United
States, ed. Marilyn Reuschemeyer (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985); and
Alexander Glezer, "The Struggle to Exhibit," in Igor Golomshtok and
Alexander Glezer, Soviet Art in Exile (New York: Random House, 1977).

6. See, for example, Daniela Mrazkova and Vladimir Remes, Another Russia:
Through the Eyes of the New Soviet Photographers (New York: Facts on File,
1986).

7. Viktor Misiano, "Photographers without Photography." Contemporanea
(September 1989): 65.

8. Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the
Present (Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1968), 136.

9. Christine Frisinghelli and Manfred Willman, "A Sort of Unprotected Pain,"
Camera Austria 42 (1993): 15,

10. Quoted in Susan Emily Reid, "Center and Periphery in the Contemporary
Art World of the CIS," unpublished paper, 1993, p. 8. My thanks to Susan
Reid for sharing this paper.

11. Tatiana Salzirn, "Moscow-Vienna, New York-Moscow," in Moskau-Wien- New
York: Kunst zur Zeit (Vienna: Wiener Festwochen, 1989), 106.

PHOTO: FIG. 1 Alexander Slyusarev, Untitled, 1980s, gelatin silver print.
Collection of the artist.

PHOTO: FIG. 2 Boris Smelov, Man with a Hatchet (after Raskolnikov), 1975,
gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist.

PHOTO: FIG. 3 Igor Moukhin, from the series Monuments, 1992, gelatin silver
print. Collection of the artist.

PHOTO: FIG. 4 Igor Moukhin, from: the series Monuments, 1992, gelatin silver
print. Collection of the artist.

~~~~~~~~

By John P. Jacob
JOHN P. JACOB is director of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston
University.

Copyright 1994 by College Art Association. Text may not be copied without the express written permission of College Art Association.

Jacob, John, After Raskolnikov.., Vol. 53, Art Journal, 06-01-1994, pp 22.