by Martha Rosler

Russian photography today, like all of Russian culture, is in a transitional state. The end of Communism has meat not so much a social revolution as a devolution, a falling away of a regime rather than an aggressive imposition of a new direction. Photography is still viewed as a minor art, both blessed and cursed by the fact that photography as an art form was not supported by the Soviet state. "Official culture" did, however, promote photojournalism, to pictorialize, personalize, and heroize Soviet achievements in life and labor. Now, ex-Soviet photographers are free to develop independently. Many are familiar with Western photography and are influenced by it in varying degrees depending partly on their level of education and access to foreign materials. Many deny such influences out of a desire for personal originality or national authenticity - desires that may or may not conflict with that for international recognition and reward. This essay is not a theoretical intervention as such but a report written after my return from a photography symposium and exhibition in Moscow.

Photography as an art form has recently gained some small degree of official and semiofficial support in Russia. This is so partly because photography can be counted on to provide a readily comprehensible and easily displayed medium of expression, as a carrier of aesthetic values or as a self-effacing ideological utterance. New historiographies are useful in depicting Russian history, to which artistic and intellectual history is integral, as a ruptured continuum in the process of reuniting its severed threads. This "normalization" is the constant theme: how to rebuild a civilization based in - as Gorbachev baldly put it, skirting the edge of desperation - "our common European home." In case the point needs underlining, a national identity is a ticket to economic stabilization as much as to national pride. But there are undercurrents to this rewriting of the national identity - now partly fathomed outside Russia's borders - that are neither so rational nor so attractive to the industrial "West." Especially in a culture in which art has been regarded as integral to the fabric of national life, we should expect to find a relationship to ideological and political issues, even if that relationship is eschewal. Efforts at de-Sovietification have included resurrections of earlier Russia styles and attitudes, including mystical and psychic strains of literary and aesthetic production, alongside sharp attention to successful Western styles - the latest incarnation of the dispute between Slavophiles and westward-looking intellectuals. One also finds a retardataire relationship to issues of gender and difference. The search for new personal identities in the context of new national ones - Homo non-Sovieticus - has been a critical factor in the intensive regendering of post-Soviet cultural expressions and social expectations. Attempts to reassert and celebrate Russianness, which itself must be seen as part of an intention to join an international community, have covered a spectrum from notions of sexual expression to cultural work.

In support of photography, the Russian Ministry of Culture has begun a new photography acquisition program and also provides some assistance (little of it financial) to exhibitions and events, as do some foreign groups. Within a day or two of each other in early January 1994, several photography exhibitions and events were held in Moscow. The Dutch-organized World Press Photo exhibition, brought in with financial support from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, opened at Cinema Museum, and the photographs and photomontages produced in the interwar period by German modernist photographer Anton Stankowski were shown at A3 Gallery with German state sponsorship. Opening across town was an exhibition, organized by Joseph Bakshtein and Saint Petersburg curator Yekaterina Andreyeva, of photographs and videotapes by influential Saint Petersburg "underground" artist Yevgeniy Yufit.

In a sense these shows were satellite exhibitions to the first part of an ambitious exhibition cycle opening at the same time, a projected history of Russian photography from its origins to the present called "Art of Photography in Russia: From Origins to Our Time," constituting part of the new historiography. There have been several other wide-ranging photography exhibitions since perestroika, such as "150 Years of Photography," held in Moscow in 1989, but none so ambitions.

The locution "Art of Photography" is faithful to the Russian original; this title, and the very scope of the program, appears to signal a desire to rewrite the history of the use of the camera with artistic intentions, to reinscribe photography within the universe of discourse of art, not propaganda, advertising, photojournalism, technical instruction, or other instrumentalities. Rather than starting with historical material, however, the opening exhibition in this project was a survey of contemporary photography called "Art of Contemporary Photography: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus," with about seven hundred works made by some seventy photographers. The exhibition was held at the Central House of Artists, a contemporary-art facility sharing a building with a branch of the Tretyakov Art Gallery. The project was sponsored not only by the Ministry of Culture but also by the ROSIZO State Museum and the Moscow Photography Foundation and was partly funded by two of the new Russian banks and a publishing house.

I mention the sponsorship of these shows to demonstrate the degree to which Russian cultural ministries have been tutored in the Western, particularly American, modal of shifting the costs of culture to the business sector and the "public." The organizer of the big Moscow show told me that bank sponsorship had been quite difficult to obtain, but I imagine it was no more so than obtaining corporate support in the U.S. This, too is part of the "normalization" of Russian culture along Western models. (In early 1993, for example, a dozen prominent Americans from the Citizen Exchange Council - a New York-based cultural-exchange organization - went to Saint Petersburg to teach Russian officials how to reorient the country's cultural institutions toward such revenue-generating activities as museum shops, admission charges, and private memberships.)

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Ministry of Culture sponsored a symposium titled "Postphotography," put together by Irina Bazileva of the Moscow "Laboratory" Foundation and photographer and organizer Sergey Gitman, along with "Art of Contemporary Photography" organizer Yevgeniy Berrezner and others. Photographers and critics from the United States and Western Europe as well as ex-Soviets were invited to this symposium, held at the Central House of Artists on January 14 and 15, 1994. At such post-Soviet gatherings, what passes for international outreach is generally aimed beyond the rest of the former Eastern bloc to the West, to the exclusion of the rest of Eastern and Central Europe. (This seems to be mutual, in that former Soviet art world participants don't seem to get many invitations to their gatherings, either.)

Whereas exhibition openings are crowded, few Russian artists or art lovers care to attend the associated discussions, which thus attract primarily critics and foreign visitors. That was true of this conference, despite the scope of its intentions. During the symposium, I had expected a certain flowery form of address on the part of speakers and perhaps a formal courtesy toward them. Instead I was reminded of the contentiousness with which Russians greet controversial ideas. The audience responded favorably to American photographer Sarah Hart's talk on the use of computers in photography and art, likely to transform the entire mode of production and distribution, and to Arizona artist Tamarra Kaida's photo-silkscreen work; talks by the exhibition organizers and other Russians, including Valeriy Stigneev's long discussion of the history of "naive" Russian photography, were politely received. But strong reactions greeted the more theoretical interventions. When Margarita Tupitsyn, Russian-born but now an American citizen, presented her paper, "Against the Camera for the Photographic Archives," she met with heated argument. Tupitsyn described the use of photography to legitimize the cult of Stalin, which created a general distrust of the medium that made it useless as a critical tool until Ilya Kabakov began using it in this manner in the 1970s. "Not Kabakov again!" the audience cried. German photographer and writer Manfred Schmalriede's lecture on staged photography in the United States and Western Europe provoked sharp criticism that he had joined too many disparate types of images.

I want to concentrate on the symposium audience's reaction to the presentations on images of women and sexuality, partly because this was the subject of my own presentation and partly because it provides a look at the reception accorded particular themes perceived as "imported." Audience members voiced vehement objections to the talk "The Body as a Catalyst: On Photography, Feminism, and the Body," given by Maria Lindt, a Swedish critic and writer for the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Lindt offered a history of U.S. feminist art theory as backdrop to current photography by Swedish women, and her emphasis was on the need to find strategies that do not simply reverse or reframe oppressive representations. I was not surprised by the willfulness of some of the long diatribes directed against her presentation only because of my previous experience with Russian audiences confronted with gender theorization. The germ of such objections, from both men and women, is that "feminism" is alien to Russian society and art. When a young woman - as modestly attired as any nun - rose up to say that in Russia we women find our bodies to be important means to power over men, we Western women couldn't determine what sort of power she had in mind, and there was no answer to our muttered question about what happens to that power as women age.

The theme of a quasi-mystical indigenous and essentialist culture that forms an underlying beat to much of the reception of art had again surfaced. Similar attitudes greeted my presentation, "Women and Women's Image in Post-Soviet Society," which immediately followed Lindt's and which considered the relationship between Russian women's rejection of feminism and their history since the Revolution - including the present, in which women, especially professional women, form a high proportion of the unemployed while sexuality seems women's most capitalizable resource.

The present photographic exploitation of women's bodies as art or advertising in Russia, and in the rest of the former Eastern bloc, is overdetermined. Idealizations of the nude or, to lesser extent, grotesque representations of the (generally female) body are an important element of contemporary photographic practice throughout the Eastern bloc and are typically resistant to criticism from without. In post-Soviet societies, the creation of a space for the personal, for "the private," (Margarita Tupitsyn claims in her introductory essay to "After Perestroika: Kitchen-maids or Stateswomen", p. 20, n. 10, that there is no equivalent Russian word for our concept of "privacy," which could not develop under the Soviets because of the widespread communal living arrangements.) is a primary necessity, and for many photographers this seems to have suggested the use of nudes; the naked body stands for a self no longer clothed in a persona enforced by the state, perhaps to be viewed as if newly born - and manifesting (gender) difference. One can imagine the surprise that photographers and other artists must feel, reaching at last to develop a depoliticized lexicon of images answerable to no state or social dictates - and what would seem less politicized than the body? - only to discover how deeply political representations of the body are regarded by many sectors of Western society. Public debate on the commodification of sex and of sexual imagery in Russia began in 1988 with the first Soviet beauty contest, but it could hardly lead anywhere, since a serious response would seem alarmist, and a call for curbs, called by religions figures and soma populists, on sexual displays and pornography could only suggest a return to authoritarianism. Both the post-Soviet media and government spokes-men have enthusiastically adopted renaturalized gender distinctions that satisfy the masculinism still powerful in Russian culture. As I could see on my recent visit to Moscow, advertising and other areas of mass-cultural production, including soft-core pornography, are generating such images at an accelerated rate for ready audiences. The intelligentsia, who have since Soviet days seen their highly respected and, often, protected positions tumble, are understandably uneasy, yet they appear fairly unwilling to engage with the issues; they are, I assume, still following the two-culture model of high and low art. As to the apparent allergy to theoretical tendencies from abroad evidenced at the symposium, one can only imagine that people prefer to confine their encounters with such foreign imports to reading and private discussions: on this occasion as on others I have witnessed, people were highly resistant to that which might, in less concentrated form, engage them. The audience's high-key reactions to Tupitsyn's presentation, on the one hand, and to those on representations of women, on the other, suggest a desire to protect their arena of activity, upholding their status as creators or arbiters of meaning in their own fields.

A look at the "Art of Contemporary Photography" exhibition can provide insight into how foreign and indigenous pressures are reflected and diffracted in the Moscow photo scene and perhaps elsewhere. In Russia, the art world itself, including its women members, is not ready to acknowledge the suppression of difference; women are still flattered by being told that they "think (or paint or photograph) like men." "Art of Contemporary Photography" included only a handful of women photographers(10) and even fewer non-Slavs. (But the West, we should remember, has little to congratulate itself for in this regard.) Works by ten women and fifty-seven men were included in the exhibition.

Aestheticism or even tastefulness seemed to hover as an overarching selection criterion, which made the exhibition seem a bit cautious. Overtly political themes were absent, although voyeurism was not. Very little of the grotesquerie - including grotesque representations of primarily female nudes, which are an aspect of the quasi-mystical strain that has resurfaced in Russian cultural production - was on view in this show, whose most visible example of nose-thumbing "bad taste" was the mocking self-portrait nudes of Boris Mikhailov, whose work, absurdly, has been sniped at as copying Western production.

Only a few other works included in "Art of Contemporary Photography" suggested (post)conceptual art rather than something confined to photographic discourse. We may read this as an insistence on the photographic, but after post-modernism there is no longer any possibility of modernist purity in an international arena, although not everyone in the "photographic community" is willing to face up to this. While the fall of Sovietism has set artists free to work independently, formal and informal structures have also been created. Some are primarily outlets, such as galleries, both public and private, among them the new Moscow Gallery XL, showcasing internationally savvy contemporary art, including photography. Some new dealer-entrepreneurs, busy promoting their wares here, there, and everywhere, are arousing admiration and hostility. Some, like the post-Soviet Russian Union of Art Photographers, find their strongest role as a sort of clearing-house for people from many areas of Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia. The group has organized exhibitions, symposia, and even Volga cruises aimed primarily at increasing revenues from abroad and setting up international networks. The daily workshops and lectures it offered during the cruises drew large audiences, but there too audience resistance to new ideas was palpable. Although its name suggests a desire to stake out the entire terrain of noninstrumental photography, partly on the now discredited Soviet model of cultural workers' unions, this "union" is simply one player on the art stage. And, contradictorily, photojournalists play key roles in the union, and some commercial (that is, advertising) photographers are courted by it.

According to Tatiana Salzirn, writing in the Moscow paper "Sevodnya" ("Today", or "The Daily"), what marked a departure in "Art of Contemporary Photography" was, in effect, that the work was shown as art: with excellent frames, a carefully spaced installation, and the complete exclusion of photojournalism (an exclusion, I note, unlikely to have occurred with the assent of a group like the photo union). But what kind of (photo) art was in those well-placed frames? The tastefulness of the show meant that on the whole the work followed well-recognized photographic strategies, and the majority of the work was either documentary or metaphoric in impulse. The former tended to emphasize daily life - including that of non-Russian groups, such as Rita Ostrovskaya's photographs of Jewish life in the Ukraine, or Farit Gubaev's images of Tartarstan, or Lyalya Kuznetsova's of gypsies of Kazan. The work I have called metaphorical seems intended to reveal the photographer's sensitivities; in this category are many (symbolic) images of women, nude or clothed, looking meaningfully out from some setting, often a natural one.

The few ironic or metacritical works in the show, mostly from the late 1980s, suggested cognizance of Western production. These included works by Francisco Infante, Dmitriy Shneyerson's "Gods Lost" photomontages (which refer specifically to other photographers), Sergeyí Bratkov's bookshelf installation of photo portraits (of photographers?) in canning jars, and Vladimir Kupreanov's two larger-than-life portraits on freestanding acrylic. (Both these projects were among those most recent works in the show more properly classified as art or installation than as straight photography.) Work in color, such as Ivan Sokolov's staged tableau or Viktor Kochetov's photomontages, tended to be more fanciful, surreal, constructed, or staged, but many photomontages, such as those by Valerøy Cherkashin, were executed in black and white, although some were then hand colored. Hand coloring, particularly identified with the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, presumably is used to bring photography not only into the subjective realm but also into the realm of art.

The show as a whole, and its individual works, is profitably read as in a dialogue with Soviet photography. In contrast to the early Soviet period, when Alexander Rodchenko, Georgií Zelma, and others depicted women and girls engaged in sports and other activities, "Art of Contemporary Photography" showed far more predictable images of active men and passive women. Quite a few people, such as Galena Moskalova, Vladimir Filonov, Valeriy Lobko, Maria Serebryakova, Sergey Kozhemyakin, and Igor Savchenko, appropriated images from the Soviet archive and from people's personal photo collections for various uses. But even those most insistently formalist (Yevgeniy Gabrielev, Nadezhda Medvedeva, Ilya Nagibin) or privatist were engaging with the past.

Tatyana Salzirn suggests, in her catalogue essay "Stay, Fleeting Moment," that the post-Pop concept of the artist as an accumulator of mass-cultural objects has made its mark on current Russian photography, but to my eyes the signs of the artist as maker remain, and the artist does not appear as a kind of cipher. Even in Yuriy Rybchinskiy's rephotographed color contact proofs, for example, the bureaucrat's portraits are cut and arranged into attractive geometric patterns. The anti-intentional framings of Americans like Garry Winogrand haven't been adopted, perhaps because they signal a relinquishment of the authorial control that Russian photographers seem still anxious to emphasize, and few works use documentary strategies while undermining their capacity for descriptive meaning. I suppose this represents a triumph of optimism over cynicism on the part of the Russians.