Dnipropetrovsk School of Photography (Ukraine, 1970 - 80s)
© Yuri Brodsky
Dnipropetrovsk Photography School: The other side of time
Soviet photography, as the historical framework for emergence of the Dnipropetrovsk School, promoted reportage – the so-called “truth of life”. From its inception, the common belief in the realistic nature of this art form was difficult to find in the almost sterile Soviet Union propagandist photography environment, where the art was transformed into an ideological tool. History has proven that reportage photography in the USSR was in demand in times of social upheaval: the 1920s, the 1950s and the 1980-1990s – when a new view of the world, new styles, new trends, new schools appeared.
It is believed that the Dnipropetrovsk Photography School combined unofficial reportage with pictorial photography, with its strong roots in Ukraine in the 1900-1910s. Well-known pictorial photographers Oleksandr Grinberg, Mykola Andreyev, Vasyl Ulitin, Yuri Yeriomin, Mykola Svishchov-Paola, Mykola Petrov, participated in major photography exhibitions and salons in Europe, the USA, and Japan, where they received prestigious awards. Pictorial photographers used special shooting and printing techniques to highlight the features that made the images look closer to painting and drawing, allowing other art forms to complement the core of their photographic method without direct interference .
Unlike the Kharkiv School of Photography, well known for its rigid critical stand towards the Soviet art system and political doctrine as a whole, Dnipropetrovsk photographers were almost completely distanced from any social context. In today’s terms, they are rather modern street photographers, because indicators of time and place in their images, with an exception of occasional artifacts, are difficult to identify. The works of Dnipropetrovsk authors are apt combinations of form and plot, of incredible love for details (in the absence of storyline) arranged in a sort of urban ‘still life’ (O. Feldman).
But this photography can hardly be called a chronicle of its time because the artists managed to go beyond the documentary era to the territory of contemporary art – where an individual image is self-sufficient and significant by itself. The Dnipropetrovsk Photography School, as well as the Kharkiv School, can be attributed to the so-called “alternative Soviet Photography” – a phenomenon that has entered the global artistic context through Kharkiv-born Borys Mykhailov. Mykhailov showed the West “the other side” of Soviet reality, while Dnipropetrovsk artists downplayed its current features. Almost ecstatic in their experiments with printing, toning, retouching techniques in different styles and directions – from symbolism to conceptualism – they eventually nullified the very essence of a photographic image, but extracted a new meaning, something deeper than just evidence of time.
Marlen Matus
© Stanislav Polonsky
The sudden surge of creative photography in Dnipropetrovsk is associated primarily with the name of Marlen Matus (1939 – 2014), who, in 1978, organized the Dnipro Photoclub. Oleksandr Feldman – one of the most active Dnipropetrovsk photographers and one of a few Ukrainian photography theorists today – initiated the club’s “Youth Section”, which united about a dozen photographers in their creative search. They met every Sunday for nearly three years in the haphazardly equipped Feldman’s studio, to experiment, to engage in inspired discussions, and to print their photos. They were Mark Rozov, Yuri Brodsky, Mark Milov, Stanislav Polonsky, Serhiy Artemenko, Volodymyr Kryvytsky, Vadym Zolotnik, Larysa Feldman, and Vita Buivid, a complete beginner at the time. Thus there began the history of the school that in a few years was on a par with the Leningrad, Kharkiv, and Minsk photography schools.
With the help from Oleksandr Feldman, Semen Prosiak, one of the senior generation Dnipropetrovsk photographers, printed his famous Sedniv series with gray passepartout framing – and later, it traveled through numerous exhibitions in Ukraine, Lithuania, Russia with flying colors. It is still considered a work of genius in the photographic community. The ‘Youth section’ artists moved each their own way, but whether they liked it or not, they worked out a mutual artistic style, which justified the concept of “school”. Impressionists cherished their impressions; expressionists were preoccupied of expressing themselves; Dnipropetrovsk photographers focused on living through their individual and common histories there and then.
Like essays on parallel reality, Oleksandr Feldman’s photos tell incomprehensible fragmented stories, as if allowing us to touch them. Feldman’s imagery pictures the Soviet era’s afterlife, filled with wondrous and sometimes terrifying scenes, occasionally supplementing them with a drawing or omitting a certain detail. Mark Milov’s soft and gentle cityscapes refer the viewer to the origin of photography, when it seemed that time could be stilled in its eternal unchanged beauty. Yuri Brodsky, as if aware of the world much more than we are, attempts to find in the vast expanses a human, or just a living being, and, when not succeeding, leaves room for the presence of a spiritual being in exchange. Another story about photographic search is the exalted My strangers by Stanislav Polonsky, a manifestation of the most distanced, even cold-blooded view on the world in which he cannot easily find a place for himself.
above image © Oleksandr Feldman
Undoubtedly, the Dnipropetrovsk School photographers were attracted to pictorialism, but it was sooner a philosophy, an approach consciously used by a contemporary artist, who admires the works of forgotten portraitists of the late 19th century as well as those by Jan Saudek or Ansel Adams. Place, moment and individual talent combined formed the artistic phenomenon now called the Dnipropetrovsk Photography School, despite the absence of any preconditions like cultural and artistic life of the city, education or social request. It is not just a phenomenon that emerged in an industrial city contrary to “proletarian photography” stereotypes; it is a bright and important page in Ukraine’s art history.
© Lyolya Goldstein, Masha Khrushchak,
curators
(Translation from Ukrainian)