Making Sense of the Selfie: Digital Image-Making and Image-Sharing in Social Media

Making Sense of the Selfie: Digital Image-Making and Image-Sharing in Social Media,” Scriptus Manet 1, No. 1 (2015): 47–59. ISSN: 2256-0564.


The article addresses digital photographic self-portraiture in social media (so-called selfies) as an emerging sub-genre of amateur photography. The article is a result of my involvement in the research project Selfiecity (2013-2014), based on the analysis of 3,200 selfies shared on Instagram from five global cities: Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and Sao Paulo. This research project was conducted by Software Studies Initiative, a research lab led by Dr. Lev Manovich and based in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In this research project, the lab used computational and data visualization methods to analyze large numbers of photographs shared on Instagram. In this article, I situate the selfie in the context of history of photography and seek to inscribe this sub-genre in a broader genealogy of photographic self-portraiture. 
 

The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kyiv

The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kyiv,” co-authors: Jay Chow, Lev Manovich, and Mehrdad Yazdani.

Paper presented at the Big Humanities Data Workshop, The Second IEEE Big Data 2014 Conference, Washington, DC, October 27, 2014. This version of the paper is published in IEEE Big Data 2014 Conference Proceedings (2014), 77-84.

This paper presents and discusses some the findings of the research project The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 Hours in Kyiv (2014) which I co-authored with Lev Manovich, Mehrdad Yazdani, and Jay Chow.

Abstract:

How can we use computational analysis and visualization of content and interactions on social media network to write histories? Traditionally, historical timelines of social and political upheavals give us only distant views of the events, and singular interpretation of a person constructing the timeline. However, using social media as our source, we can potentially present many thousands of individual views of the events. We can also include representation of the everyday life next to the accounts of the exceptional events. This paper explores these ideas using a particular case study – images shared by people in Kyiv on Instagram during 2014 Ukrainian Revolution. Using Instagram public API we collected 13208 geo-coded images shared by 6165 Instagram users in the central part of Kyiv during February 17-22, 2014. We used open source and our own custom software tools to analyze the images along with upload dates and times, geo locations, and tags, and visualize them in different ways.

See also my essay "Iconography of the Revolution" on the website of the project.  In this essay, my research question is: What is the visual grammar of a revolution? In order to grasp the characteristics of the images related to the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution on social media, I suggest we look back at some of the most iconic depictions of similar events such as the social upheavals in the streets of Paris in 1848, 1871, and 1968. 

Thibault. Barricades on Rue Saint-Maur, June 25, 1848. Paris, 1848.

Thibault. Barricades on Rue Saint-Maur, June 25, 1848. Paris, 1848.

Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg. Barricades of the Paris Commune Near Hôtel de Ville and the Rue de Rivoli. April 1871, Paris

Pierre-Ambroise Richebourg. Barricades of the Paris Commune Near Hôtel de Ville and the Rue de Rivoli. April 1871, Paris

Gilles Caron. Protest in Rue Saint-Jacques. Paris, May 6, 1968.

Gilles Caron. Protest in Rue Saint-Jacques. Paris, May 6, 1968.

Montage of Instagram images depicting the barricades in Kyiv, 2014. See more images and analysis on the project website.

Montage of Instagram images depicting the barricades in Kyiv, 2014. See more images and analysis on the project website.

Our Muddy Boots on Their Marble Floor: Identity and Self-Fashioning in Latvian Contemporary Art

Our Muddy Boots on Their Marble Floor: Identity and Self-Fashioning in Latvian Contemporary Art.”

Paper presented at The Yale Conference on Baltic and Scandinavian Studies organized by the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies (AABS), the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study (SASS), and the European Studies Council at Yale University. New Haven, CT, Yale University, March 13–15 , 2014.


In this paper I address some of the challenges that contemporary art and artists from Latvia encounter in the globalized art world. The paper is based on my experience as a co-curator of North by Northeast, the Latvian national participation in the 55th International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale, which was open to the public from June to November, 2013, in Venice, Italy. The pavilion of Latvia showcased newly commissioned works by two Latvian artists: Krišs Salmanis (b. 1977) and Kaspars Podnieks (b. 1980).

Both artists in their work engage in a dialogue with the past by evoking and also subverting concepts that have been essential for Latvian art from its beginnings in the 19th century through the interwar years as well as during the Soviet period. This dialogue questions national identity of a country whose status has been shifting, unstable, and always marginalized. Both artists Podnieks and Salmanis in their new work talk about location and dislocation, about instability, about being uprooted and removed from one’s native land, about the uncertain identity of an individual or even the whole nation.
 

My introduction to the pavilion of Latvia at the 55th Venice Biennale

Just What it is That Makes Latvian Art So Different, So Latvian?” in North by Northeast, Catalogue of the Pavilion of Latvia at the 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (Riga: kim? Contemporary Art Center, 2013), 18-28. ISBN 9789934820076.

Cover of the catalogue. Photo: Ansis Starks. Courtesy Kim? Contemporary Art Center.

Cover of the catalogue. Photo: Ansis Starks. Courtesy Kim? Contemporary Art Center.

This is my introduction to North by Northeast, the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, co-curated by Anne Barlow, Courtenay Finn, and me.

North by Northeast in this Venice Biennale presents new works by two Latvian artists, Kaspars Podnieks and Krišs Salmanis. Both works can be misleading in their seemingly one-liner appearance. An upside-down tree and a series of black-and-white photographic portraits of farmers – is this a simple case of what you see is what you get? I would like to argue that it is rather the opposite – you are supposed to get what you actually do not see.

Latvian contemporary art is essentially a misunderstanding, an exception, or possibly a miracle. There is no tangible economic basis for the luxurious superstructure in this economically troubled country without a tradition of private funding for the arts. The audience for contemporary art is very limited, consisting of a tiny, economically, socially, and politically rather disenfranchised community of artists, art critics, and their families and friends. Besides, the long history of Soviet rule in Latvia developed a strong antipathy towards politically or socially explicit art. With a backdrop of highly politicized mass communication and visual culture, and ideologically charged official art, anything apolitical was seen as an escape, as a source of pleasure, sometimes even as a form of resistance. Speaking and reading between the lines was the major rhetorical strategy adapted by almost all social strata, equally employed in casual everyday conversations as well as in visual art, poetry, literature, and theater. The legacy of these generations is still very much present, therefore one should not expect a Latvian contemporary artist to be openly Marxist, anarchist, or any other sort of social revolutionary. What then should one expect? This essay attempts to articulate some possible answers.
 

From left: Kriss Salmanis, Alise Tifentale, and Kaspars Podnieks. 2013.

From left: Kriss Salmanis, Alise Tifentale, and Kaspars Podnieks. 2013.

From left: Anne Barlow, Alise Tifentale, and Courtenay Finn. 2013.

From left: Anne Barlow, Alise Tifentale, and Courtenay Finn. 2013.

Book Review: Toward a New Art History of the Soviet Period

"The Situation is Hopeful: Another Step Towards a New History of Art of the Soviet Period,” review of Recuperating the Invisible Past, compiled and edited by Ieva Astahovska (Riga: Center for Contemporary Art, 2012; 284 pages, 110 ill.), Studija 88 (2013): 70-75.


The effort that the Center for Contemporary Art has invested in making this almost comprehensive survey and evaluation of our cultural legacy from the Soviet period is priceless. This collection of articles marks a major step forward on the way toward systematic and conclusive research of a highly problematic historical period.

At the same time the book sharply highlights the problems which are yet to be resolved, among them those of terminology and methodology. These unresolved issues provide grounds for a positive and hopeful mood: there is still plenty to do for the researchers working in the field, and we can anticipate new discoveries, perhaps even new theories of art history.

 

Western Rock Videos of the 1980s and 1990s in the Soviet Union

'The Place I Wanted to Live In’: Western Rock Videos of the 1980s and 1990s in the Soviet Union,” in Maija Rudovska, ed., Inside and Out (Riga: kim? Contemporary Art Center, 2012), 2-9.  ISBN 9789934820069.

Rock music is only possible when you are young. Rock stars on stage would jump and sweat through some kind of Dyonisian rituals, accompanied by the energetic, emotionally uplifting sound of their music. Live concert recordings made up a large part of the 1980s music videos, and the ecstatic atmosphere in these videos was often underlined by shots of excited fan crowds. For example, such videos as “You Give Love a Bad Name” (1986) by Bon Jovi, “Final Countdown” (1986) by Europe, “Love Removal Machine”, “Lil’Devil” (1987) and “Wild Hearted Son” (1991) by The Cult, “Everybody Loves Eileen” and “I’ll Never Let You Go” (1990) by Steelheart, and “Monkey Business” (1991) by Skid Row manifest this tendency.

The fact that these rock stars – men - are using make-up and have long, “feminine” hairdos, can suggest a certain sexual ambiguity or at least uncertainty. Or perhaps the tights, eyeliners, and perm rather functioned as attributes of emphasized masculinity? Manifestations of androgyny or uncertain gender identity in the "cock rock" world can be interpreted as a proletarian offspring of the aristocratic dandyism of the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, notice how the aesthetic refinement of George Byron, Oscar Wilde, and Aubrey Beardsley was recaptured by David Bowie in the 1970s. In the 1980s this sexual undecidability was reduced to the standard combo of long hair and skinny leather pants. If rock music of this era had any true macho hero at all, it could only have been the demonic Glenn Danzig, who at the time had the most athletic torso, the most menacing look, and who could easily tame an alligator with his bare hands (see the video for “I’m the One,” 1990).

The Peasant Woman Leads the Dance: Some Ambiguities Presented by Vera Mukhina’s Sculpture

The Peasant Woman Leads the Dance: Some Ambiguities Presented by Vera Mukhina’s Sculpture,” Russian Art & Culture 1 , no. 1 (2012): 7-15. Winner of the First Prize in Russian Art & Culture Postgraduate Writing Competition 2012. View the full issue of the journal for free here on Issu.

Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina (1889-1953) is most widely known as the artist of the grandiose stainless-steel sculpture Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937), which crowned the Soviet pavilion in the Paris International Exposition of 1937, strategically located opposite the German pavilion. 

However, this sculpture does not exhaust Mukhina’s oeuvre. Another challenging topic for an art historian is her Peasant Woman (1927), recently discussed at length by Bettina Jungen (“Vera Mukhina: Art between Modernism and Socialist Realism,” Third Text 23, no. 1 (2009): 35-43).

In this article, I am addressing some of the issues raised by Jungen, especially the opposition between the formalistic and politicized readings of the Peasant Woman. In addition, this article views Mukhina’s sculpture in terms of gender and class notions of the ideological background from which it emerged. Finally, I also discuss the artist’s relationship with the official art establishment in these terms as well, considering Mukhina’s upbringing in a pre-Revolution bourgeois family and her career as one of few female artists in the theoretically emancipated but in reality largely patriarchal Soviet official art institutions. By identifying some ambiguities in the current criticism and interpretations of Soviet official art, I hope to propose some perspectives for further inquiry that would lead to a thorough understanding of the contradictory and multilayered history of the official art in the Soviet Union.

Exhibition review: Ostalgia at the New Museum, New York (ARTMargins)

“Ostalgia at the New Museum (Review Article),” ARTMargins, March 5, 2012.

Download the article as pdf. 

Read the article on ARTMargins website for free: https://artmargins.com/ostalgia-the-new-museum/

Check out also my other review of Ostalgia, published in Studija 81, no. 6 (2011) — pdf available here!

Excerpt from the review:

Conceived as “a survey devoted to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics,” this exhibition represents a politicized, exoticized, and marginalized view of art from the former Soviet empire, making the Communist past, or, more precisely, the Western notion of it, the central axis of the show.

Deliberately blurred notions of geography and chronology complicate the rational coherence of the show, suggesting that diverse individual artistic practices and cultural backgrounds (from Central, Eastern, Southern, Northern European and Asian countries) belong to the same cultural milieu. Arguably the dialogue of art with a totalitarian regime creates the otherness that the Western audiences most often expect from the art of the former Communist bloc. Emphasizing this dialogue conveys the same simplified identity of the Other that has been continuously constructed in the West since the late 1960s by such seemingly contradictory players as leftist intellectuals and the capitalist art market, according to Éva Forgács.

Ostalgia encourages the canonization of works that reflect the tastes and formal preferences of a narrow circle of mainly Western collectors, and narratives by mainly Russian critics and theoreticians. Art from a large part of Europe therefore seems doomed to be viewed only as a heroic gesture of political resistance that can easily “fit into either the Western or the Russian narrative,” without individual artists, trends, or schools having a distinct, singular voice outside these two grand narratives.

View selected works from the exhibition on the New Museum's website.

Read full article for free on the ARTMargins website or download a pdf!

Photographers’ Escape Route: Camera Club as a Place of Control and a Platform of Resistance in the Postwar Soviet Union

Photographers’ Escape Route: The Camera Club as a Place of Control and a Platform of Resistance in the Postwar Soviet Union.”

Paper presented at the 27th Annual Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, November 1–3, 2012.

Photography in the Soviet Union and in the so-called Communist Bloc countries in Europe developed quite differently from the west after the World War II. In the Soviet Union, in the absence of free art market and in circumstances of severely limited freedom of expression and restricted human rights in general, all forms of art were integrated into the larger framework of Soviet communist ideology and politics. Art photography had a very marginal place in this framework.

In this paper, I am addressing the role of camera clubs that initially were established as places of control and indoctrination of workers, but that in some exceptional cases became platforms of relative freedom of style and communication for artists, partly protected by their hobbyist status and not belonging to the official arts establishment. The two decades following Stalin’s death in 1953 are discussed, starting with the so-called Khrushchev’s Thaw (the mid-1950s – early 1960s).

The paper focuses on a case study of Riga Camera Club, founded in 1962 in Riga, capital city of Latvia (then Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia). This club is viewed as one of the leading entities raising discussions and public awareness on art photography in the Soviet Union. It can be argued that all three Baltic countries annexed to the Soviet Union after the war—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, despite being geographically small, had a significant influence upon arts and culture in general of the postwar Union. These countries had retained their distinct European cultural identities even under cultural policies and infrastructures imposed by the Soviet government. During the interwar years, they had enjoyed all freedoms and challenges of democratic nation-states, and their cultural milieus remained different from that of Russia and the rest of the USSR.

Unconventional Art: The Emergence of New Photographic art in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union

Unconventional Art: The Emergence of New Photographic art in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union.” Paper presented at the SECAC (South Eastern College Art) annual conference Collisions: Where Past Meets Present, Meredith College, Durham, NC, October 17–20, 2012.

In this paper I explore photography as a new and unconventional art emerging in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953, during the period often called the Khrushchev’s Thaw. I discuss the paradox that this art appears surprisingly apolitical, seemingly socially passive, and escapist, but at the same time this passivity in some cases functioned as an active political position, or at least as a statement of a certain level of artistic freedom in the given political circumstances.

I also introduce some major difficulties of analysis and interpretation of this art from the perspective of western canon of art history and photography, which can easily accommodate the Soviet avant-garde photography of the 1920s and early 1930s, but which has no place for later, postwar developments that do not follow the historical narrative of advanced practice of photography in the western culture.

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The Origin of Homo Novus in Latvian Photography

The Origin of Homo Novus in Latvian Photography,” in Helena Demakova, ed., Vilnis Vītoliņš. This is Latvia. Photographs 2007–2011 (Riga: Andrejsala. Riga Contemporary Art Museum & Satori, 2011), 14-27. ISBN 9789934804762.

The aim of this essay is to outline the historical background for the unusual photographic work of Vilnis Vītoliņš (b. 1955, Latvian) in the 2000s. In order to understand why his work is so outstanding and sometimes difficult to accept for the Latvian audiences, in this essay I offer a tour through the development of photographic aesthetics in Latvia during the second half of the 20th century. This "little history" of Latvian photography for this purpose starts in 1955, the year when Vītoliņš was born in Cesvaine, a small town in Latvia. Approximately at the same time, Edward Steichen opened the influential exhibition The Family of Man in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Vilnis Vītoliņš. The Bridge of Islands (then Moscow Bridge). Riga, 1984. Gelatin silver print. 18x18 cm. Courtesy the artist.

Photographer Inta Ruka

Photographer Inta Ruka. [An interview with photographer Andrejs Grants],” in Helēna Demakova, ed., The Self. Personal Journeys to Contemporary Art: The 1960s–1980s in Soviet Latvia (Riga: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, 2011), 364-374. ISBN 9789934801037.

Download the article pdf here.


Inta Ruka (b. 1958) is one of the most well-known Latvian photographers who has achieved great success in portraiture. Among her signature series are: My Country People (1983-1998), People I Have Met (1999-2004), and 5a Amalijas Street (2004-2008). The creative development of Ruka in the 1980s is closely related to the young generation that was defining its position in the photography of this decade, “the new wave of photography.” They turned to documentary material. The documentary as “un-manipulated” or “uncompromising” realism for them opened up new avenues for photography that were opposite to the principles of image making and aesthetics cultivated in the Latvian photographic art in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ruka and other then young photographers, including Andrejs Grants, attracted attention of the curators of art exhibitions at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, such as Helena Demakova, Vid lngelevics, Philip Legros, Barbara Straka and others. Reviewing the catalogues of the first important exhibitions of Latvian photography in the West in the late l980s and early 1990s, one will always find the name of Ruka in the list of participants, along Andrejs Grants, Egons Spuris, Gvido Kajons, or Valts Kleins.

Grants and Ruka emerged from a milieu connected to The Ogre Camera Club, named after its location - a town not far from Riga. The club was led by photographer Egons Spuris, Ruka’s teacher and husband. Andrejs Grants in this conversation discusses the context and conditions under which the new wave of photography could arise in Latvia and such artists as Ruka develop.
 

Five Sentences about Soviet Art

Five Sentences about Soviet Art,” Dizaina Studija 29, no.2 (2011): 68-70.

Because Latvian art from the Soviet era is at the center of my academic research, I regularly encounter questions which are yet to be explained and solved. To what extent do the artworks from this era display a “Soviet” influence, how much is there of “Latvian” art, and how much is there simply “art”? Should the fact that photography at this time was included in the field of “amateur art” be the defining factor to continue interpreting it as "amateur" from today's perspective? Is it necessary to have a broader insight into the institutional structure of Soviet art and into (no doubt ideological) texts about Soviet art published in the press of that time? Or, alternatively, is it better to have a distanced outsider’s view concentrating only on the artworks themselves, rather than the circumstances of their making? Should we call the era in question the “Soviet period”, or perhaps it is enough to simply mention the decade in which the work was made? But isn’t it also important to remember that it was made under Soviet rule, which resulted in self-censorship and the inhibition of information exchange, personal movement and other restrictions?

Photographers Breaking the Iron Curtain: The Role of Informal International Communication Networks in Soviet Photography

Photographers Breaking the Iron Curtain: The Role of Informal International Communication Networks in Soviet Photography.” Paper presented at the IAMCR (International Association for Media and Communication Research) annual conference Cities, Creativity, Connectivity, Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Turkey, July 13–17, 2011.


The paper discusses the role of the information exchange networks in the development of photography in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, and presents a study on photographers from the Camera Club of Riga (Latvia) who managed metaphorically to break through the Iron Curtain and participated in photography exhibitions worldwide.

Although photography from the Soviet Union in general has been analyzed in different contexts both in post-Soviet countries and in the West, the specific fields of amateur photography and art photography in the 1960s and 1970s still have not been covered completely. Besides, history of photography in the Soviet Union often has been identified with history of Russian photography, only occasionally mentioning national schools of other Soviet republics with different cultural and social circumstances.

This paper outlines some of the complex issues related to the understanding of institutional framework of amateur and art photography in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and 1970s, and focuses in particular on Riga Camera Club (Latvia), an amateur organization that became one of the most visible hubs of creative photography in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, and whose members succeeded in participating in numerous international photography exhibitions outside the USSR.

The New Wave of Photography: The Role of Documentary Photography in Latvian Art Scene During the Glasnost Era

The New Wave of Photography: The Role of Documentary Photography in Latvian Art Scene During the Glasnost Era” in Stephen Andrew Arbury and Aikaterini Georgoulia, eds., Visual and Performing Arts (Athens: Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2011), 121-128. Proceedings of the 2nd Annual International Conference on Visual and Performance Arts at the Athens Institute for Education and Research, Athens, Greece (6–9 June, 2011). ISBN 978960954965.

A major shift in the role and perception of photography as a medium of the visual arts in Latvia took place on the background of the political events in the mid-1980s that ultimately led to the collapse of Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. In Latvia, then one of the Soviet Republics, the idea of restoring the country’s independence dominated the public debates. Also the visual arts often were discussed in terms of the current political and social changes. Following the pattern of neglecting the past, in the mid-1980s a ‘new wave of photography’(Demakova, 1999) was rising in Latvia. The proposed paper describes the social and aesthetic context of the ‘new wave’ of Latvian photography, and discusses the role of the documentary imagery in the visual arts. Although Latvian photographers were ‘freed to picture even the ugliest truths’ (Svede 2004), the new documentary imagery was not confused with photojournalism with its more direct and sometimes aggressive stances and rarely it represented any ‘shock-pleasure’ (Welchman, 1994)value associated in the West with photography from the Soviet Union.

The paper analyses the photographs that ‘shifted into the dominant “fine art” context’ within the specific Soviet and early post-Soviet visual culture in Latvia. Several Latvian photographers earned recognition during the late 1980s after their participation in exhibitions outside the Soviet Union. These photographers shaped and defined photography as one of the ‘new media’ (Demakova, 2000) in Latvian contemporary art of the early 1990s.The paper adds an insight into the changing attitudes towards documentary photography in Latvia during the glasnost era.
 

The Language and Value of Things under Communism and Capitalism

The Language and Value of Things under Communism and Capitalism,” Dizaina Studija 16, No. 6 (2008): 66-74; 86-88.

Photographs published in the postwar Soviet era magazines and newspapers eloquently describe for the next generation the grain and sugar beet harvests in collective farms; the increase in production in significant manufacturing facilities: the huge volume of milk gained from cows and the accomplishment of the five-year plan over a period of three or four years in factories; the triumph of the will of the people over the elements of nature and the continually increasing prosperity of the proletariat. Examining the visual material in chronological order, a gradual change in emphasis can be observed.

There are gradual changes in the choice of scenery and in the formal structure of photographs. The depiction of growth was often politicized in the Stalin era. That later turned into the final tiredness of the period of stagnation which is exemplified by the inexpressive portraits of members of the politbureau and other officials frequently appearing in the press in the 1980s. This tiredness, in turn, soon was shaken up by the unrest of perestroika and glasnost.

Meanwhile, a sort of “golden age” existed among these extremes in the 1970s. That was a time when for many Soviet citizens a certain level of comfort and well-being in everyday life became accessible. When examining photographs that speak of this golden age, it is not possible to overlook the surprising similarities with the ways how Latvia’s current version of capitalism is expressed in press and advertising photographs.

Art Belongs to the People! Socialist Realism in Photography

Art Belongs to the People! Socialist Realism in Photography,” Foto Kvartals 10, No. 2 (2008): 50-67; 95.

Although the term Socialist Realism traditionally is used in relation to painting, sculpture, literature, and cinema, photography of the Soviet era was also supposed to follow this ideology. This article offers a glimpse into the principles of Socialist Realism in the images from the photographic chronicle "Republic in Photographs" that was distributed to Latvian newspapers by TASS / Information agency LATINFORM of the Council of Ministers of Soviet Socialist Republic of Latvia from 1974 to 1978.