Authors

Liga Goldberga¹;  ¹ Art Academy of Latvia, Latvia

Discussion

Archives, like people, have multifaceted biographies as they interact in complex networks of relationships. Their status and roles change in relation to different contexts and discourses of art and politics. Through the biography of Latvian photographer Zenta Dzividzinska's (1944-2011) archive, this paper investigates the inclusion of Soviet photo club culture in the history of Latvian photography. Dzividzinska participated in the photo club culture during the 1960s and early 1970s, which at the time was one of the seldom state-approved fields for practising art photography. Her archive lay dormant for almost twenty years until it resurfaced in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union when curators sought to discover the works of lesser-known photographers. Since then, certain works of Dzividzinska have circulated in the field of history of photography and in the last decade have established themselves in the local art canon. Dzividzinska is one of the few Soviet Latvian women photographers who has attained visibility and yet a large part of the archive remains little studied. By applying a posthumanist perspective derived from the new materialism approach and critical studies this paper examines the changing status of photography in the discourse of art and how political changes and the gendered setting of the Soviet photo club arena have affected the circulation of Dzividzinska’s archive and the Latvian art photography canon in general.