Authors

Liāna Ivete Zilde¹;  ¹ Art Academy of Latvia, Latvia

Discussion

The collapse of the Soviet Union marked a sweeping political, economic, and cultural shift in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States. While visual histories of this period often highlight moments of public upheaval – protests, dismantled monuments, and the grey realities of economic hardship – other equally transformative artistic narratives unfolded in parallel. This paper examines the work of Baltic female photographers, particularly focusing on Ina Stūre (1958-2006), who subverted the dominant, male-centered paradigms of Soviet-era photography to explore personal and experimental approaches during a time of scarcity and uncertainty. Employing staged compositions, self-portraits, material and tonal experimentation, and DIY techniques, Ina Stūre blurred the boundaries between domesticity and creativity. Her creative work and vernacular archive juxtapose the demands of caregiving, household duties and artistic expression, transforming private spaces into sites of subtle resistance and innovation. Nowadays, often neglected or marginalized in official histories of the medium, these practices challenge canonical narratives of Baltic photography, highlighting personal and experimental works as central to understanding the region’s cultural identity. Focusing on materiality and female histories, this paper revisits these underexplored archives to argue for their significance within a broader and currently ongoing framework of decolonizing regional photographic histories.