I'm excited about the opportunity to present my talk titled "The Afterlife of a Forgotten Archive: Artist Sophie Thun Interprets the Photographic Legacy of Zenta Dzividzinska," live on Zoom at 5 pm EST on Saturday, March 8, 2025, as part of a global online conference "Women of Photography."  

I’m beyond excited to welcome everyone to the session I’m organizing and chairing, "Camera-derie: Collaborative, Communal, and Collective Practices in Photography," at the CAA 113th Annual Conference in NYC. We’re scheduled for the first day of the conference, Wednesday, February 12, 2025, from 2:30 pm to 4 pm, at the New York Hilton Midtown.

This is a review of these two major photo exhibitions that I saw during my research visit to Riga, Latvia, at the end of 2024: “Gleizds, Paper, Scissors” at the Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum and “Binde 100–10” at the Latvian National Museum of Art.

So thrilled to see my article “Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011)”, published in MoMA Post in 2021, now included in an anthology of Central and Eastern European feminist writing.

The talk will be delivered via Zoom. Find the registration link and more details about the event here: https://www.photographynetwork.net/news/worldwide-photo-clubism

A panel I’m organizing and chairing has just been accepted for the CAA (College Art Association) 113th Annual Conference that will take place at the New York Hilton Midtown, New York City, February 12–15, 2025. Mark your calendar and please come participate in the conversation!

I had the honor to serve as an external reader on Paulius Petraitis’ dissertation committee. Paulius defended the doctoral dissertation “Intermediality and Networked Meaning-Making in Contemporary Baltic Art Photography” on June 18, 2024.

For this essay, I revisit the collaboration between the artist Sophie Thun and the archive of my mother, the artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska. The collaboration, initiated by the curator Zane Onckule, began in 2021 and later continues in Sophie’s other projects.

Absolutely and positively thrilled to see my research article "Working the Labor-Leisure Machine: Proposal for a Photography Museum Without Images" just published (February 2, 2023) in the Season 1 of the new creative collaboration platform Riga Technoculture Research Unit (RTRU) - www.rtru.org.

“Landscape as a Form of Escape: Apolitical Art and Politics in the Soviet Union between c. 1945 and 1991” is a talk I delivered at the mM Art Center in Pyeongtaek, South Korea, on January 28, 2023. I was invited to give this talk on the occasion of an exhibition showcasing the mM Art Center’s unique and diverse collection of apolitical art from the Soviet Union.

This article is one of the deliverables in the research project, Life with COVID-19: Evaluation of overcoming the coronavirus crisis in Latvia and recommendations for societal resilience in the future (VPP-COVID-2020/1-0013) that was implemented from June 2020 to March 2021. The project was led by Alise Tifentale who from December 2019 to March 2021 served a visiting researcher at the Communication Studies department, Riga Stradins University, Riga, Latvia.

I reviewed two new photo books that offer an insight into the press photography of Soviet Latvia from the 1950s—1970s: Dominiks Gedzjuns. 1956-1961, edited by Toms Zariņš and Aleksejs Muraško (Riga: Kultkom, 2021) and Bonifācijs Tiknuss Takes Photographs Half a Century Ago, edited by Andrejs Tiknuss in collaboration with Ēriks Hānbergs and Voldemārs Hermanis (Riga: Madris, n.d.)

I had the pleasure and excitement to serve as a discussant at the ASEEES 2021 Annual Convention virtual session Fake Equality: The Activity, Impact, and Representation of Women in Photo Clubs and Organizations in the Late Soviet Period. The panel session went live Thursday, December 2, 2021 8am CST (4pm EET).

My former boss at the Riga Stradins University, Dr. Anda Rožukalne, added my name to the Pastaiga magazine list of top Latvian women in science and education 2021.

New interview! “Photography as Heritage. Baiba Tetere in Conversation with Alise Tifentale,” CreativeMuseum.lv, August 31, 2021. We talked about, among other things, photography as cultural heritage, photography as the ultimate symbol of modernity (by way of Batchen, Flusser, and Azoulay), and my own research and current work with the Art Days Forever archive.

“We Can See Her Being Seen,” a conversation with artist Ieva Raudsepa, Alise Tīfentāle, archivist Līga Goldberga, artist Sophie Thun, and curator Zane Onckule at the exhibition “I Don’t Remember a Thing: Entering the Elusive Estate of ZDZ” at Kim? contemporary art center. August 26, 2021, Arterritory

Together with Katrīna Teivāne-Korpa (National Library of Latvia) and Inese Sirica (Art Academy of Latvia), I co-organized a photo research symposium and summer school “Mapping Methods and Materials: Photographic Heritage in Cultural and Art-Historical Research,” Riga, Latvia, August 16-20, 2021.

I had the pleasure to think and write about 20th century Russian art for the essay, “The Lesser Known Romantic Side of Soviet Art,” published in exhibition catalogue Good Morning USSR. The exhibition took place at the NAMA Gallery, mM Art Center, Seoul, June 30 - July 30, 2021.

My talk about Brazilian modernist photography and the global photo-club culture of the 1950s and 1960s at the Almeida e Dale gallery (São Paulo, Brazil) on the occasion of a new virtual exhibition, “Men at Work. Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante at the IV Centennial of São Paulo,” curated by Iatã Cannabrava.

I had the honor to participate in a panel discussion on the occasion of the exhibition celebration and virtual opening reception - Communism Through the Lens: Everyday Life Captured by Women Photographers in the Dodge Collection at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, on April 29, 2021.

Chapter by Alise Tifentale, "The Selfie: More and Less than a Self-Portrait," appears in the new Chinese edition of The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture (2020). The book chapter was written in 2016, and the original English edition was published in 2018, edited by Moritz Neumüller.

An interview with Alise Tifentale by professor Ivars Austers, radio show “In the Name of Science” (Zinātnes vārdā), radio NABA, on air April 15, 2021. Radio NABA is part of Latvian public broadcasting service, aimed at student audiences.

With great excitement I accepted the invitation from curator and photography historian Marly Porto to serve on the photo essay exhibition jury at the 2021 edition of Photothings festival that she’s organizing in São Paulo, Brazil, in March—April 2021. The winning photo essays are shown in a virtual exhibition, opening April 27.

Sizzling hot off the metaphorical press! New article in Museum of Modern Art’s online research publication Post. Notes on Art in Global Context, listed in sections Central & Eastern Europe and Art and Gender.

Alise Tifentale reviews the book Silver Girls. Retouched History of Photography in conversation with the editors of the book, Šelda Puķīte and Indrek Grigor. The video first aired on March 24, 2021.

In conversation with Arnis Balcus, photographer and editor-in-chief of FK Magazine. Video recording of the conversation published online on September 25, 2020.

In August 2020, I participated in a round table discussion about censorship and freedom of speech in the time of #metoo and Black Lives Matter.

On December 31, 2020, the Riga-based Low Gallery published the second edition of The Crisis Newsletter (Krīzes Vēstnesis), for which I had the pleasure to write a short essay on the daily photographic practice on Instagram: “#dailyphotography and #fail”

This is an essay on contemporary landscape photography commissioned by the Riga Photography Biennial.

My article "Machines, Methods, and Humans: On the Production Line of Contemporary Photography" just published in Fotografija 35, no. 1 (2018). This is a special edition of the magazine, edited by Paul Paper.

I'm thrilled to let you know about the recently published article, "Seeing a Century Through the Lens of Sovetskoe Foto," where I discuss some of the findings of my research of the history of the leading Soviet photography magazine, Sovetskoe Foto, which was published in Moscow, Russia, from 1926 to 1991.

Earlier this spring I had the honor to present my research in a talk "The Networked Camera: Mapping the Universe of Instagram Photography" at the panel Social Media in Theory & Praxis: What Is at Stake Now? at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, on April 18, 2018.

I’m excited to present my latest research in the talk “The Family of Man (1955) and the Family of Photographers: Insiders and Outsiders of the Most Famous Photography Exhibition" at the international symposium  "Now Memories" in Riga, Latvia, on April 13, 2018.

Just published! New book chapter is out: Alise Tifentale, “The Selfie: More and Less than a Self-Portrait,” in Moritz Neumüller, ed., Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture (London, New York: Routledge, 2018), 44–58.

Hot off the press! New book chapter: Alise Tifentale and Lev Manovich, "Competitive Photography and the Presentation of the Self" in Jens Ruchatz, Sabine Wirth, and Julia Eckel, eds., Exploring the Selfie: Historical, Analytical, and Theoretical Approaches to Digital Self-Photography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 167-187.

"What you're working on these days?" people often ask, adding "I haven't heard from your for a while." To answer this question at least partly, here I quickly summarize some of my work from 2017 and outline some projects that are coming up in 2018. Happy and productive New Year! 

I am thrilled to see that a fragment of the German translation of my novel, Riga Warmth (2003), is included in an anthology of Latvian literature, published in Austria. The novel was published first in Latvian, as Rigas Siltums, in 2003. It was translated into German and published in Switzerland as Im Sog von Riga ten years later, in 2013.

Hot off the desk! Just finished two new research articles for the January 15 deadline. These articles offer insights into two major photography exhibitions of the 1950s that have shaped the history of postwar photography - The Family of Man and Photokina 1956.

I had the honor to speak on behalf of the jury of the AHL 2016 Visual Art Award at the AHL Foundation's 13th Annual Benefit Gala & Awards Ceremony, New York City, October 22, 2016. The work of the jury was not easy because all submissions were of high quality. The prizes went to the artists whose work stood out the most - artists who had the most convincing voice and the most articulate vision.

This article, commissioned by Riga Photography Biennial 2016, focuses on the role of technologies in defining and understanding the selfie. I examine the difference between the way datasets of selfies are being constructed for research and comparison, and how selfies are consumed and experienced in their natural habitat, the live flow of images on Instagram.

In this article, I introduce a term competitive photography and define its historical emergence in the international juried exhibitions of photography in the 1950s. I believe that this term, competitive photography. brings into focus a large segment of photographic practices, contemporary and historical alike, which so far has escaped the attention of scholars. 

In an interesting historical turn, what was meant to be non-art, became the very epitome of art (as exemplified by Albert Renger-Patzsch’s followers), whereas the most artistic photography of the 1950s (Otto Steinert’s Subjective Photography) turned out to be a dead end, at least from the perspective of today's art history.

This article belongs to a series of related articles and book chapters that I have written since the late 2014 and early 2015 about photography in social media and selfies in particular. All these writings are based on research project Selfiecity that I co-authored with Lev Manovich, Moritz Stefaner, Mehrdad Yazdani, Dominikus Baur, Daniel Goddemeyer, Nadav Hochman, and Jay Chow.

This article touches upon some of the inherent complexities of understanding the selfie. Seeking for valid methods of theorizing and contextualizing the selfie, this article attempts to combine insights from the perspectives of history of photography and art history, digital humanities, and software studies.

There’s two kinds of photography, one that follows the rules and one that does not. When you follow the rules, you get good photography. When you break the rules, you might either get good art or waste the resources. After years of studying photography that breaks the rules, I’m turning to photography that follows the rules.

Gisèle Freund in 1954 wrote that "Women are interested in things more than in their relations to each other. They are not easily attracted by political or current events, but they distinguish themselves in portraits, children’s photographs, and they know how to capture with subtlety every expression of everyday life." From today’s perspective, it may sound outrageously “anti-feminist” and patronizing. But what if she was right?

Judging the 2015 Contemporary Visual Art Competition for Korean artists working in the US, organized by the AHL Foundation. The foundation awards generous prizes and helps the artists to promote their work by organizing a group exhibition at the Art Mora Gallery in Chelsea, NYC.

Why the early Soviet photography exhibition in The Jewish Museum is an outstanding overview of this important moment in the history of photography.

How to describe the relationship between butoh, a performance based on movement and emotion, and photography, a medium that freezes movement and removes all emotions? To address this question, in this article I compare of Kamaitachi (1968) by Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933), and Riga Pantomime (1964-1965) by Latvian photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011).