rxmd
May contain traces of nut
Hi,
for my post #1700 here you'll get a nice little morsel from photography culture in the former Soviet Union. For my lifelong side project (outlined in this thread) I've been starting to take some oral history interviews with people here in Uzbekistan who had some personal connection with photography. On Friday I was sitting in a restaurant with two former photojournalists, one Kazakh and one Russian. As I won't be writing my book for at least another ten years, here's some early glimpses at the results from that interview.
Firstly, oral history in the post-Soviet space is hard work. The biggest problem is trust, as you can't just go on recording everything on tape for later transcription. I ended up being very open about when I wanted to record and when I didn't, openly suggesting to keep the politics etc. to the non-recorded time; in effect this also helps to focus talk to the actual topic. Afterwards, transcribing an hour of recorded interview takes me about twelve hours, not counting translation into my native German. The second problem is alcohol, as you just can't sit down and talk without having to drink a lot. During the evening the three of us finished four bottles of vodka. The main body of the interview is three hours, and when I listen to it now I hear us toasting to the stupidest of things, ranging from my recording equipment over Henri Cartier-Bresson to the Nikkor 24/f2 wideangle. It's also getting increasingly difficult to focus the interview meaningfully by giving leads. On the other hand I am amazed at the surprisingly high theoretical niveau of our discussion even after three bottles; people are really quite used to function normally even after high alcohol intake.
Photographers in the Soviet Union apparently fell into roughly four classes, namely those doing consumer photography ("бытовая фотография"), amateurs, artists, and photojournalists. Of course the fact that I was speaking with photojournalists is not without its influence on this subdivision, but it shows that they had something of a separate professional consciousness. Interestingly, there was next to no professional training for photojournalists. There was a school in Moscow graduating ten journalists every year (one of my interviewees graduated from there), but that did not meet demand in any way. As a result, most photojournalists came from another profession and started doing photography out of private interest, eventually sacrificing their career for taking a relatively risky move into journalism. Photojournalists thus were mostly highly motivated people with love for their job. Photojournalist jobs were highly coveted, so there was a high amount of competition, a somewhat unusual thing for the Soviet Union. This resulted in people constantly trying to achieve high-quality output and commenting on each other's work, and it also meant that if your output was mediocre for a couple of weeks you could find yourself losing your job, which was again an unusual situation in the Soviet Union. A good photojournalist could earn about 300 to 350 roubles a month in the early 1980s, which was a lot of money, more than a university professor and close to what a minister would receive; journalism, however, was less lucrative than consumer photography (weddings, portraiture etc.), because as a consumer photographer you had many opportunities to make money on the side. That also meant that few consumer photographers, who actually had professional training as photographers, quit their job for photojournalism, because it meant a loss of money, again making photojournalism a job of love.
The way photojournalists regarded their own work was apparently very much related to what we would call street photography. (I am citing these aspects from memory, I haven't transcribed the section of the interview yet.) Soviet photojournalism was a highly ideology-driven discipline on one hand, but on the other hand there was the idea to capture the moment. The ancestors of Soviet photojournalism were on one hand the early agitprop photographers of the 1920s up to the war, such as Penson, Litvinsky, Shaykhet etc., on the other hand Western street photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, whom both of my interviewees held in high regard. The objective of photography was mainly communication; not an unexpected answer when talking to journalists. When I pointed out that photography could serve other purposes as well, such as serving as a prop for a person's memory as in personal albums etc., the answer was that this was in effect another form of communication, namely that of a person with himself over time, which I rather liked (I need to look up where that idea comes from). We then talked about the aforementioned wartime survivor project, which consisted largely of triptychs of a portrait of the soldier during the war, a picture in their present surroundings, and a closeup portrait of the old person's eyes to illustrate the life experience that they had been going through, a combination that nicely illustrates the communication-over-time idea. Photography also could serve to influence the life not only of the viewers, but of those photographed. One of the interviewees recalled an example where he was posted in Bukhara in Uzbekistan for a month to shoot photo essays for the Uzbek women's magazine for which he was working, called Saodat ("happiness" in Uzbek). Amongst other things, he documented a factory and took a portrait of a worker girl there; chatting to the girl, she told him that she had a boy she loved, but because he was from an old elite family and she was from a poor background, his parents were opposed to their marriage (the classic story). The picture then appeared in the magazine, which had a print run of about a million and was circulated all over the Soviet Union. When he was in Bukhara a couple of years later, he inquired about the girl and was told that after her portrait appeared in Saodat, she began receiving large amounts of fan mail including marriage proposals from all over the Soviet Union; she then told her boyfriend's parents that she was in high demand and that if they refused to allow her to marry their son, there would be parents all over the Soviet Union eager to have her for a daughter-in-law; the parents eventually consented to the marriage and they lived happily ever after. The story is of course a classic setting, but is is quite cute nevertheless. For the book I need to dig up the portrait eventually (and maybe find the girl in Bukhara, if this is still possible.)
As far as devices are concerned, at least in the 1970s and 1980s practically no Soviet photojournalists were using Soviet gear, which had a reputation for being largely for amateurs. APN photographers were largely shooting Nikons (APN being the "Novosti" press agency, formed in 1961 from the former Sovinformburo, and now called RIA Novosti), a few were shooting Leicas. The still Leica has a next to mythical reputation. I had my M5 with me and we ended up playing around with it a lot. On a side note, the M5 specifically had the reputation of being made "for Americans with their big hands", the most popular models being the M4 and M6. On the other hand, both journalists said that ultimately gear is irrelevant, as a professional photographer should be able to do his job with any tool at hand; the important thing is catching the moment, and for that, according to them, you don't need a Leica, but you do need a trained eye. There were apparently few Soviet cameras that had a reputation for professional use; this included the early Moskva rangefinders for portraiture, and the Kiev medium format cameras for studio and product photography, but not, however, any Soviet rangefinder including the Kiev (by the 1970s anyway). Photographic artists used Soviet equipment quite a lot, on the other hand, because it was relatively cheap; we talked about the example of a Latvian photographer in the 1980s who did portrait projects with survivors of World War II using a mainly couple of Zorkies with Russar wideangles (which were again rather unusual and expensive optics).
These are obviously only a few small glimpses, but I think they still give a few impressions. I hope to continue this project in the future; my next planned interviewee is a camera collector, so we can hear something about collecting in the Soviet Union 🙂
Philipp
for my post #1700 here you'll get a nice little morsel from photography culture in the former Soviet Union. For my lifelong side project (outlined in this thread) I've been starting to take some oral history interviews with people here in Uzbekistan who had some personal connection with photography. On Friday I was sitting in a restaurant with two former photojournalists, one Kazakh and one Russian. As I won't be writing my book for at least another ten years, here's some early glimpses at the results from that interview.
Firstly, oral history in the post-Soviet space is hard work. The biggest problem is trust, as you can't just go on recording everything on tape for later transcription. I ended up being very open about when I wanted to record and when I didn't, openly suggesting to keep the politics etc. to the non-recorded time; in effect this also helps to focus talk to the actual topic. Afterwards, transcribing an hour of recorded interview takes me about twelve hours, not counting translation into my native German. The second problem is alcohol, as you just can't sit down and talk without having to drink a lot. During the evening the three of us finished four bottles of vodka. The main body of the interview is three hours, and when I listen to it now I hear us toasting to the stupidest of things, ranging from my recording equipment over Henri Cartier-Bresson to the Nikkor 24/f2 wideangle. It's also getting increasingly difficult to focus the interview meaningfully by giving leads. On the other hand I am amazed at the surprisingly high theoretical niveau of our discussion even after three bottles; people are really quite used to function normally even after high alcohol intake.
Photographers in the Soviet Union apparently fell into roughly four classes, namely those doing consumer photography ("бытовая фотография"), amateurs, artists, and photojournalists. Of course the fact that I was speaking with photojournalists is not without its influence on this subdivision, but it shows that they had something of a separate professional consciousness. Interestingly, there was next to no professional training for photojournalists. There was a school in Moscow graduating ten journalists every year (one of my interviewees graduated from there), but that did not meet demand in any way. As a result, most photojournalists came from another profession and started doing photography out of private interest, eventually sacrificing their career for taking a relatively risky move into journalism. Photojournalists thus were mostly highly motivated people with love for their job. Photojournalist jobs were highly coveted, so there was a high amount of competition, a somewhat unusual thing for the Soviet Union. This resulted in people constantly trying to achieve high-quality output and commenting on each other's work, and it also meant that if your output was mediocre for a couple of weeks you could find yourself losing your job, which was again an unusual situation in the Soviet Union. A good photojournalist could earn about 300 to 350 roubles a month in the early 1980s, which was a lot of money, more than a university professor and close to what a minister would receive; journalism, however, was less lucrative than consumer photography (weddings, portraiture etc.), because as a consumer photographer you had many opportunities to make money on the side. That also meant that few consumer photographers, who actually had professional training as photographers, quit their job for photojournalism, because it meant a loss of money, again making photojournalism a job of love.
The way photojournalists regarded their own work was apparently very much related to what we would call street photography. (I am citing these aspects from memory, I haven't transcribed the section of the interview yet.) Soviet photojournalism was a highly ideology-driven discipline on one hand, but on the other hand there was the idea to capture the moment. The ancestors of Soviet photojournalism were on one hand the early agitprop photographers of the 1920s up to the war, such as Penson, Litvinsky, Shaykhet etc., on the other hand Western street photographers such as Cartier-Bresson, whom both of my interviewees held in high regard. The objective of photography was mainly communication; not an unexpected answer when talking to journalists. When I pointed out that photography could serve other purposes as well, such as serving as a prop for a person's memory as in personal albums etc., the answer was that this was in effect another form of communication, namely that of a person with himself over time, which I rather liked (I need to look up where that idea comes from). We then talked about the aforementioned wartime survivor project, which consisted largely of triptychs of a portrait of the soldier during the war, a picture in their present surroundings, and a closeup portrait of the old person's eyes to illustrate the life experience that they had been going through, a combination that nicely illustrates the communication-over-time idea. Photography also could serve to influence the life not only of the viewers, but of those photographed. One of the interviewees recalled an example where he was posted in Bukhara in Uzbekistan for a month to shoot photo essays for the Uzbek women's magazine for which he was working, called Saodat ("happiness" in Uzbek). Amongst other things, he documented a factory and took a portrait of a worker girl there; chatting to the girl, she told him that she had a boy she loved, but because he was from an old elite family and she was from a poor background, his parents were opposed to their marriage (the classic story). The picture then appeared in the magazine, which had a print run of about a million and was circulated all over the Soviet Union. When he was in Bukhara a couple of years later, he inquired about the girl and was told that after her portrait appeared in Saodat, she began receiving large amounts of fan mail including marriage proposals from all over the Soviet Union; she then told her boyfriend's parents that she was in high demand and that if they refused to allow her to marry their son, there would be parents all over the Soviet Union eager to have her for a daughter-in-law; the parents eventually consented to the marriage and they lived happily ever after. The story is of course a classic setting, but is is quite cute nevertheless. For the book I need to dig up the portrait eventually (and maybe find the girl in Bukhara, if this is still possible.)
As far as devices are concerned, at least in the 1970s and 1980s practically no Soviet photojournalists were using Soviet gear, which had a reputation for being largely for amateurs. APN photographers were largely shooting Nikons (APN being the "Novosti" press agency, formed in 1961 from the former Sovinformburo, and now called RIA Novosti), a few were shooting Leicas. The still Leica has a next to mythical reputation. I had my M5 with me and we ended up playing around with it a lot. On a side note, the M5 specifically had the reputation of being made "for Americans with their big hands", the most popular models being the M4 and M6. On the other hand, both journalists said that ultimately gear is irrelevant, as a professional photographer should be able to do his job with any tool at hand; the important thing is catching the moment, and for that, according to them, you don't need a Leica, but you do need a trained eye. There were apparently few Soviet cameras that had a reputation for professional use; this included the early Moskva rangefinders for portraiture, and the Kiev medium format cameras for studio and product photography, but not, however, any Soviet rangefinder including the Kiev (by the 1970s anyway). Photographic artists used Soviet equipment quite a lot, on the other hand, because it was relatively cheap; we talked about the example of a Latvian photographer in the 1980s who did portrait projects with survivors of World War II using a mainly couple of Zorkies with Russar wideangles (which were again rather unusual and expensive optics).
These are obviously only a few small glimpses, but I think they still give a few impressions. I hope to continue this project in the future; my next planned interviewee is a camera collector, so we can hear something about collecting in the Soviet Union 🙂
Philipp