Some glimpses into Soviet photographer culture

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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
 
Great read Philipp! And it looks like you're acquiring the ethanol endurance that Slavic people known for (or at least often ascribed with).

From what I know (tracing it to casual conversations and snippets from Sovetskoe Foto), while journalists in "upscale" bureaus indeed used imported gear, those in smaller papers were often stuck with Soviet gear, mostly for budgetary constraints. Older (1950s) Kiev RFs were well-known workhorses in particular.

As you seem to have a firm grip of Russian, I would suggest to read this cycle of short stories. Dovlatov was a journalist in USSR, and these are some typical, although semi-fictional, accounts.
 
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Very interesting Philipp.

When I was in Poland in the late 1980s the professional photojournalists seemed to shoot Canon mainly, because there was authorized Canon service in Warsaw. Student journalists often had access to Kiev 88's. Zenit SLRs were popular amateur cameras. I don't think I saw many rangefinders at all except in used camera shops, and generally not Soviet ones. New camera stores often had Lubitel TLRs, but they were generally regarded as junk, so they sat on the shelves.

I bought a Pentacon 6 setup with four CZJ lenses while I was there for about $135 (about 4.5 times the average worker's monthly salary at the time), and was able to blend in on the street much more easily than I could with my Canon New F-1. I shot black-market Agfachrome 100 usually. When I came back to the US, I traded the Pentacon for my first studio lighting kit.

I also picked up a Krasnogorsk 3 16mm outfit, but couldn't afford to shoot 16mm back in the US, so I made a nice profit off that one too.
 
Great post Philipp !

Perhaps you can unveil the mystery of the camera division of the Arsenal factory ?

Cheers,
Ruben
 
Phillip, I have to wait 3 days to find time to read this, just because I am so enthused about the premise of your project. 😀

I wish you all the best luck and destiny in this project, as it would no doubt be a labor of love.
 
When I first started working in Kazakstan in 1994, I rarely ever saw a Japanese SLR.I often felt a bit conspicuous with my "Western camera gear", I was shooting either a Nikon FA or a FM2. To fit in I started using Soviet gear Kiev and Zorki and Fed rangefinder cameras .
At the commision store I always saw older German box and folder cameras as well as the Pentacon lenses. I knew a few professional photographers who used mostly Soviet gear or older (1960's) German gear. I bought a Fed 3 and several lenses from a photographer who wanted to get a Japanese camera. This man now in his 60's and still working has gone digital.
My local Russian collector friend has or had a large collection of German and other cameras. I once traded an apartment for a Lindhof and set of lenses. He also has a set of Rolleiflexes with wideangle and telephoto lenses. The great story is where and how these cameras arrived in Central Asia.

He once offered me a Leica M4P with a set of lenses for $1800. Unfortunately, he asked me two days before I was leaving and it was impossible to get the money at tsuch short notice. The 21mm alone was worth getting.:bang:
My geologist friend in Bishkek uses a Yashica SLR and a Fed 3 . He had the lenses adjusted to the camera and said that for best results they would have to be adjust to fit any of my ltm cameras.
My friends in Kazakstan now all shoot digital and most have better cameras than I do and find it humorous that I will shoot slides with my Kiev 6 or Moskva 4. But then again they do not see the Velvia slides when they come back.
 
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