Dnipropetrovsk School of Photography (Ukraine, 1970 - 80s)
© Yuri Brodsky
Dnipropetrovsk Photography School: View from afar
Dnipropetrovsk Photography School appeared in one of the capitals of the socialist industry – a symbolic Babylon of the Soviet era. This city and the entire project grew in the region of Jewish shtetls (communities), behind silent streets, throbbing with prayer and thought directed to eternity. Dnipropetrovsk Photography School was a strange child of its time, unfamiliar and unpredicted, like any manifestation of living culture whose genes were miraculously unchanged by the official Soviet mindset. Dnipropetrovsk Photography School was not an exception among other photographic phenomena in that era and that country. However, having emerged where it did emerge, the school absorbed various earth currents and energies of the people that created it. Among the other schools – Kharkiv and Leningrad, Minsk and Volga – it was even visibly different, the way it shone with its sfumato and loneliness. “The School of existential contemplation” – that’s how Yevheniy Berezner defined it. It was him who created the “Dnipropetrovsk School” brand name in the early 1990s and placed it onto the world map of photography.
Photographic schools of the Soviet era were a phenomenon of the 1980s, when they formed in different cities, some of which claimed to be the Cultural Capitals (at least, regional), and some appeared on the cultural map due to photography, more precisely, the birth of photography Artists. They created the Schools - restoring them out of the 19th century history of organically fed by a history that surpassed the mere photographic one – the history of their culture. In Dnipropetrovsk, those Artists were the photographers that gathered at the same time and place in Oleksandr Feldman’s studio; and, in discussions and experiments, by alchemic sublimation of the sum of individual figures there appeared something whole, later named the Dnipropetrovsk Photography School.
The 150 Years of Photography exhibition in Moscow, 1989, was the true inspection for nascent schools of contemporary photography across the country. Conceived as a photography anniversary, it comprised the material from all the institutions’ and artists’ collections available within the USSR. Out of its 3000 images – from the first Russian daguerreotypes to the images of avant-garde artists, banned for nearly a half-century (including Rodchenko and El Lissitzky) the exhibition also represented a significant segment of contemporary work. This collection was an effort of Yevgeniy Berezner and Georgiy Kolosov. It was while putting the show together at the Manege Exhibition Hall and monitoring the current status of photography in the country that it became clear that “schools” as sets of artists united by regional and aesthetic principles did exist.
(above image: Feldman’s Studio © Stanislav Polonsky)
In the Russian art history tradition the word “school” is used in two meanings: first, it is an association around a teacher’s figure, either informal or institutionalized. Second, a “school” is often equivalent to the term “circle of masters”, commonly used in the science of art abroad. The latter meaning is important for photography as it emphasizes free and equal participation of artists in the association. But in the 1970 - 1980s, when schools formed in different cities of the country, it was the identity of one or two personalities that determined the creation of a new phenomenon. A school was a crucible, where outside information was melted into a homogeneous substance (information about the world photographic trends in those decades, despite limited access to its sources, penetrated censorship bans like photons of light, bit by bit fueling artistic debates and researches).
Talking of Dnipropetrovsk, the centre of its school was Oleksandr Feldman’s studio, and the school’s informal leader was its owner. In Feldman’s art, mechanical figures, like Drosselmeyer’s marionettes, inhabit open streets and interiors, acquiring sufficiency of their existentiality. Another artist without whom the Dnipropetrovsk School would hardly exist is Yuri Brodsky. His early images were poetic sketches that later evolved into a tragic opposition between loneliness and infinity of the world. Loneliness is a dice thrown onto the day’s gaming table by the hand of unknown Fate. Brodsky’s photos are spiritualization of the contemplated incomprehensible.
© Semen Prosiak
The Dnipropetrovsk School had its intuitive predecessor, Semen Prosiak. He recorded “the messages of nature” as if not realizing their true meanings, just as Matthew the Apostle recorded after his Master. Mark Mylov was looking for an expressive form like the sfumato of monocle lens and toning as a framework for his photographic contemplations. For Stanislav Polonsky, the common spirit of the Dnipropetrovsk Photography School materialized in the immaterial mood moving behind the shadows of his “strangers” (the artist’s most famous and paradoxical series of images).
The second approximation to understanding of the School’s significance and its contribution to the development of photography was an invitation to the Contemporary Photography Art: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus exhibition in Moscow, 1994. The work of three artists whose photographic aesthetics stemmed from the School’s early achievements, Yuri Brodsky, Mark Rozov, and Vita Buivid, revealed the familiar intonation of co-presence within a photographic image. The story, the characters, the light, the optical rounding of infinite space in Brodsky’s and Buivid’s images of the 1990s were next of kin to the School‘s “existential contemplation” of the 1980s. Rozov’s alienated, as if reflected in a bottomless mirror, vision of art history and his family life stories comes from the same source. He achieves this visual distance through his optics, a “wrong” lens, letting in extra space that turns his images into a reflection of bottomless time.
In 1998, Moscow Soros Center for Contemporary Art presented The Dnipropetrovsk Photography School, an analytical project curated by Yevheniy Berezner and Vladimir Levashov (without whose books on the history of world photography Russian contemporary photography would be different). Thus, the Dnipropetrovsk School was institutionalized in Russia on the territory of contemporary art – just at a proper time and in a proper form for understanding the phenomenon of photographic schools within the independent democratic (underground in the USSR) space of contemporary photography: as a community of individual talents, photography artists, who happened to appear at the same place within the same culture.
© Irina Chmyreva
Ph.D., Senior Researcher, Institute of Theory and History of Fine Arts, a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA)
(Translation from Russian)