5 April |18:00, Latvian Museum of Photography, Marstalu Street 8 (entrace from Alksnaja Street), Riga.
Language: English, entrance fee - 1.50 EUR. www.fotomuzejs.lv

In Central European photography, the body occupies a place somewhere between history and art, suffering and delight. Photographed bodies are political: they resist, defend, and attack; they fight for freedom and to emancipate themselves. Flawed, injured, mutilated and dead bodies shock with their imperfection. Other bodies, subjected to the pressures of politics and aesthetics, sometimes attain near-perfect forms, seducing with their beauty. This lecture is an attempt to take an archaeological approach to photography of the body in Central Europe.

For, without tracing the historical context, it is hard to understand the contemporary condition of our photographed bodies. In the nineteenth century, the identity of Central European photography was unclear as the region was divided between three empires. Besides a small number of local pictures of nudes, it is specifically photographs of slain figures, such as victims of pogroms and anti-Tsarist disturbances that draw our attention.

In stark contrast to such drastic pictures are photographs by the artists of the fin de siècle, who sought beauty via a break with the academic stiffness that had reigned until that era. This prudery preceded the veritable eruption of photographs of the body that occurred during the interwar years. It is as if the states of Central Europe had not only broken free in terms of gaining independence, but that the photographers and models had been likewise waiting for the moment when they could jettison the stiff corsets that had been stifling their bodies.

In the interwar years, the nude no longer shocked anyone. Meanwhile, pornography began to appear in art salons. Far-ranging psychoanalysis would be required to explain this phenomenon, the emphatic shift towards the body that took place in interwar Central European photography. In the East, Russia had been swept up by a communist revolution, and the body was subjected to the regime’s ideological concerns. Trained by the communists, it was photographed by the Constructivists and later subjected to Socialist Realism. Parades of athletically built, half-naked youths, as well as Soviet Venuses exercising in bathing costumes, looked magnificent in the photographs of that time. After the Second World War, such an approach to the body would become mandatory across the entire Eastern Bloc. It was only after the death of Stalin – and even then, not everywhere – that there was a loosening up of the visual regime.

The fall of communism unleashed a new wave of creativity among artists. The art – and photography – that manifested itself in experimental culture was brutal, dark and grainy. The relationship between the body and photography strengthened in Central Europe during the 1990s and the first years of the twenty-first century. Breaking free likewise meant breaking all possible boundaries. Photographs of bodies evoke history, and history is inscribed in them. Photography of the body, which is caught up in politics and history, ultimately becomes a meditation on the fragility of human existence. People pass on, after which only photographs remain.

Lecturer: Adam Mazur (PL)
Organizer: Riga Photography Biennial in cooperation with Latvian Museum of Photography and Adam Mickiewicz Institute
Image: Peter Puklus. "Diana II" 2014