contemporary russian art photography || photographers of russia, unite yourselves!

Photographers of Russia, Unite Yourselves!Author(s): Sergei Gitman and Valery StigneevSource: Art Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2, Contemporary Russian Art Photography (Summer, 1994),pp. 28-30Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777479 .

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Photographers of

Russia, Unite Yourselves!

Sergei Gitman and Valery Stigneev

28

hotographic organizations have existed in Russia for a hundred years.' Their history is a chronicle of high hopes and misguided aspirations, landmark accom-

plishments and aborted initiatives, illustrious careers and human tragedies. The late nineteenth century saw an erup- tion of social activity in Russia and a consequent emergence of professional and amateur societies of all sorts. Russian

photographers, usually members of the middle classes or the

intelligentsia, decided they needed organizations of their own. In the early 1890s, photography societies began to

spring up all over the country. The publishing practice of the

day was for a photography society to sign a contract with a local publisher, who then pronounced his press an organ of the society and published material about its activities.

The Russian Photographic Society (RPS) was set up in Moscow in 1894 and almost at once was recognized as the leader of the country's photographic community. In 1895 RPS convened the first Congress of Russian Workers in Photogra- phy. The delegates, who arrived in Moscow from all over the

country, were offered an agenda that included the use of

photography in science and technology, developments in art

photography, problems of photographic technique, education, copyright, safety regulations for workers at commercial stu-

dios, and the project of creating a national museum of

photography.2 The congress had a great impact on RPS, whose membership grew from 40 on the founding day to 850 five years later, in 1900. Members of the RPS board were elected by direct ballot at a general meeting. The board, which met every week, submitted its report and a budget proposal to the annual meeting of RPS; finances consisted of members' dues and private donations. Each of about ten

general meetings held throughout the year was in effect a

scholarly symposium that discussed papers and reports on

technical and artistic issues. The society rented a large building in central Moscow, which accommodated a confer- ence room, a sizable studio with overhead lights, and a

laboratory big enough for ten people to work in at the same time. A special library was established there as well. RPS set

high artistic standards at the very first exhibit it organized in 1896. The newspapers and magazines of the day, most of which announced the exhibition, observed that the work

presented compared favorably with that seen at important photography shows abroad.

Although it was the biggest photographers' organization in the country, RPS was not the only one. Similar societies were active in St. Petersburg, Kiev, Odessa, Kazan, and Saratov. All of them organized their own regular contests

open to all photographers. The first Moscow International Exhibition was held in 1902, followed by a similar show in St. Petersburg the next year and subsequent shows in Kiev. In addition, the societies in the three important cities col- laborated in organizing a series of interesting international salons. In 1908 eleven leading societies submitted to the state Duma (as the first Russian parliament was called) "A Memorandum on Authors' Rights." It argued for granting to photographers the same rights that were the privilege of other visual artists. Surprisingly, perhaps, most of the de- mands of the memorandum were granted.

After the violent decade of World War I, the October

Revolution, and the ensuing civil war, only RPS and the All- Russian Society of Professional Photographers managed to resume their activities. The latter even published a magazine, Fotograf, from 1926 through 1929. In 1926, Sovetskoye Foto, a magazine published by the state, promulgated a course according to which only "proletarian amateur photography" was worth nurturing, and photojournalists and other

SUMMER 1994



photography workers were to be recruited exclusively from that milieu. The prerevolutionary practice of photography by individuals was to be replaced with a "collective practice," and to that end photo groups, or "circles," as they were called, were to be organized all over the country to benefit workers, peasants, students, and office workers. The People's Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, declared: "Just as every progressive comrade should have a watch, so he must know how to use a photographic camera. It is important to us to introduce the benefits of photography to the very midst of the masses."

Collectively, members of photo circles began to master photography. Together they went out to photograph, usually sharing one camera and processing the exposed material in makeshift darkrooms. In the absence of other information

resources, Sovetskoye Foto, which published how-to's for the

beginners in every issue, was a bench-side aid. The first contest organized by the magazine in 1927, under the title "The Life and Everyday Life of the Peoples of the USSR," attracted 246 participants who submitted 687 photographs. Some contestants sent in prints on photographic paper of their own making. One entry was described as a photograph produced with "a lens of unknown manufacture." For all the

scarcity of equipment and materials, the photo-circles movement continued to gain momentum, and by the end of the 1920s there were about 1,000 circles with a combined mem-

bership of 10,000. Before this quantitative growth had a chance to pro-

duce qualitative changes, however, the country's ideologues decided to thoroughly reshuffle the existing photographic community. Members of photo circles were told to become

correspondents of national, regional, local, and factory newspapers and other such publications. Amateurs could now only practice photography if it served the needs of the mass

media-including "wall papers," the handmade bulletins of local news and features displayed on factory and office walls.

According to the resolution of the Fourth All-Union Confer- ence of Worker and Peasant Correspondents in 1928, the implementation of this decree, which concerned all amateur

photographers, was entrusted to the existing photo circles, and henceforth all photo materials were to be distributed through them. Those who did not feel happy about the new arrangements could forget their hobbies. The decree pronounced photography "a weapon of the class struggle" and branded practitioners of "prerevolutionary photography" as "vehicles of petit-bourgeois ideology." In the wake of these resolutions, RPS and the All-Russian Society of Professional Photographers were disbanded and the magazine FotograJ closed.

Sovetskoye Foto paid more attention to the class orienta- tion of photographers than to photography itself and kept denouncing any professional or amateur correspondents who did not express the continuing class struggle in the country with due vigor and dedication.

Coinciding with the reorganization of the photographic movement, two photography groups came into being: Octo- ber, which included Alexander Rodchenko, and the Russian Association of Proletarian Photographers, or RAPP, which united October's opponents. Both groups were tolerated until 1932 and then were disbanded. In December 1934 Sovetskoye Foto promulgated a statement saying that amateur correspondents could not compete with professionals in terms of quality. That put an end to the campaign to cover the entire country with a network of photo circles.

World War II and the period prior to Stalin's death in 1953 left no particular mark on Soviet photography. It was only during the succeeding Thaw period that state pressure relaxed. But, by that time, art photographers as a species had ceased to exist in Russia.

In the late 1950s media photographers formed sections within the chapters of the USSR Union of Journalists. In addition, photography clubs began to spring up; there was a total of 150 such clubs in 1962. An average club consisted of fifteen to twenty members, and was managed by a chairman, a board, and an art council which determined the club's art policy. There were, however, giant clubs such as Novator in Moscow; in the 1960s Novator had as many as three hundred members and functioned as a kind of popular university of photography. A similar giant club in Leningrad, known by the abbreviation VDK, did operate a photographic college for a while with some hundred students attending its regular lectures, seminars, and workshops. Soon, other clubs came into being in Tallinn in Estonia and Riga in Latvia. These, like their Moscow and Leningrad counterparts, were primarily professional associations which also admitted some se- rious amateurs. The sixties and seventies proved to be a productive period for the country's photojournalists, who managed to elevate the standards of Soviet press photography to a level commensurate with those of the Western press.

Significant in the development of Soviet photography was the establishment of a society of photographic art in Lithuania in 1969. Through a combination of ideo- logical negligence on the part of the powers that be, the often stubborn efforts of the organizers, and plain good luck, Lithuanian photographers won for themselves the status granted to other artists in the USSR, but not to photographers.

The photo-club movement, having satisfied to a degree its members' yearnings for an education, then adopted a new agenda in the 1970s which shifted the emphasis to creativity and the ability to produce "exhibition-quality" prints. Soon Soviet photographers found ways of taking part in international salons and contests, such as "For Socialist Art" and "Golden Eye," sponsored by government-controlled public organizations of the East European bloc in the 1970s and 1980s. New opportunities and factional polarization brought about the splintering of some clubs. The more ambitious members found it productive to form semiprofessional groups,

ART JOURNAL

29



for example, the Volga Club in Nizhni Novgorod and the Nord Club in Murmansk.

Festivals of photography were a new phenomenon that

gained prominence in the late 1970s. The caliber differed

greatly from local to national festival, but the programs were similar, typically including an interclub exhibit, a review of individual portfolios and club collections, a practical semi- nar or workshop, and a cultural program. In the 1980s thematic interclub shows superseded regional festivals, with themes that usually indicated the special interests of the

sponsors. Among the more popular projects of this sort were "Nature Exhibition" (Novokuznetsk), "Through the Eyes of the Northerners" (Murmansk), and "Fisherman's Meridian" (Vladivostok). At the same time, clubs launched exchanges of shows. For example, the countrywide circulating exhibition "Foto-Orbita" (1979-80), which lasted eighteen months, involved 13 clubs, 39 artists, and some 400 photographs. Photography exhibitions began to be included in various

government-sponsored festivals of folk art and crafts. Al-

though only a few photographers were selected to participate, and those who did usually exhibited quite orthodox works, the presence of photography at mass-cultural events pro- moted recognition by the public at large of photography as an art form.

The age of perestroika had been in existence for quite a while when, in summer 1989, some four hundred Moscow

photographers, mostly journalists and commercial photographers, set up a union of their own, the Moscow Union of Photo Artists. Its founding documents, especially the charter, were

masterpieces of new Soviet legal thinking. All groups within the union had equal rights, irrespective of their relative

strength and artistic preferences. Thus, the photojournalists, perhaps the most conservative and pro-establishment (Com- munist at the time) group, who numbered 200, had the same two representatives on the board as the group of 23 "avant-

garde," or, rather, unorthodox artists, who called themselves the "parallel photography section."

Moreover, the Moscow unionists openly denounced the state-run copyright agency (VAAP). Soon union leaders and, apparently, rank-and-file members too realized there was not much to be gained by sticking and working together. Even

long-established and wealthy artists' unions, such as the filmmakers' and writers' unions, which the photographers

wanted to emulate, could no longer offer their members any meaningful benefits or even much prestige at that time. After a few meetings of the board (of which the two writers of this article are still members) the Moscow Union of Photo Artists became just a name.

In late 1990 some photographers who had known each other for years, as a result of festivals and exchange exhibitions, formed the Russian Union of Art Photographers, or RUAP. Surprisingly, this association of over five hundred photographers scattered throughout the expanses of the Rus- sian Federation and some of the rest of the former Soviet Union, has managed to survive for three historic years. Moreover, RUAP has organized a few national and international projects, including annual exhibitions and Volga River cruises, which may be remembered by a future historian of Russian photography.3

30

Notes Translation by Sergei Gitman. 1. Russian photography, as discussed in this text, means different things depending upon the period under review. Before the 1917 revolution, for example, the term referred to photography as it existed in the Russian empire. During the Soviet or Communist period, "Russian photography," especially when used by English- language speakers, primarily referred to what was known in the USSR as Soviet photography. (Even then, however, the Lithuanian photographers would object to being called Russian or Soviet; the Russians or the Ukrainians would not have minded the Soviet appelation then, although the latter would mind it now.) Since the dissolu- tion of the USSR, the term denotes photography as it is practiced by Russians, Tatars, Jews, or whomever; it may also refer to photography in some of the former republics of the USSR if the practitioners in question insist that they are Russian photographers and not Ukrainian or Belorussian (for example, Boris Mihailov of Kharkov, Ukraine, who considers himself a Russian photographer from Ukraine). 2. In fact, no national museum of photography ever materialized at the time. The establishment of the Museum of Photography of the Russian Union of Art Photogra- phers was announced as part of the Moscow International Photographic Festival in January 1993, and there is hope that the museum will have permanent premises in Moscow in 1994. 3. No national newspaper in Russia mentioned the formation of the Russian Union of Art Photographers in December 1990, nor was there any reference to the first Moscow International Photo Festival held in January 1993 (see Milton Esterow, "Sergei Gitman's 'Mad Invention'," Artnews 92 [March 1993]: 43-44), this despite the fact that photo editors and photographers from most publications were invited to and attended festival openings.

SERGEI GITMAN is the founder of FotoMost, the first independent Russian association for exhibition and artist

exchanges, which organized the first International Photo Festival in Moscow in January 1993.

VALERY STIGNEEV co-authored Problems of Poetics of

Photography (1989, 1990) and Photo Art in Russia (1990). He is a research fellow at the Institute of Art Studies, Moscow.

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