Tifentale, Alise. “Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska.” MoMA Post, March 24, 2021. https://post.moma.org/entering-the-elusive-estate-of-photographer-zenta-dzividzinska/
New article in the 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.
UPDATE: in 2024, this article was included in the anthology Central Eastern European & Diasporic Feminisms (London: Cell, 2024). Find out more about this publication here: https://www.alisetifentale.net/research-blog-at/ceed-feminisms-bibliography
Read the article on MoMA Post website: https://post.moma.org/entering-the-elusive-estate-of-photographer-zenta-dzividzinska/ or download the article PDF here: download article pdf
To learn more about the Latvian artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011), please visit the website of her archive and estate, Art Days Forever.
Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1965. Latvian National Museum of Art.
Zenta Dzividzinska. Untitled (Self-portrait). From the series House Near the River. 1968.
Abstract:
Art historian Alise Tifentale considers the difficulties of preserving and interpreting the legacy of Latvian artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011). In the 1960s, Dzividzinska was one of the few women photographers in Riga whose work was highly regarded in the local and international photo club culture. Her most significant contribution is a collection of images capturing the daily life of three generations of women living in a small house in the country. These photographs have remained largely unknown until recently. This essay highlights the sociopolitical and cultural motives for such neglect and suggests avenues of further research of the artist’s estate.
This essay introduces the life and career of Zenta Dzividzinska or ZDZ (the artist, annoyed by having to spell out her long, Polish-sounding last name, which was rather unusual in Latvia, liked to sign with this abbreviation), focusing on her artistic output of the 1960s and early 1970s. At the center of this body of work is a vast collection of images that she later titled House Near the River, which were made in and around her parents’ home on the outskirts of Iecava, a village less than an hour’s drive south of Riga. During the 1960s, while studying art in Riga and working, ZDZ often visited her parents and extended family there. Later, she returned to the house to live in it permanently with her husband, whom she married in 1969.
House Near the River comprises hundreds of negatives and prints depicting the daily life of three generations of women as it unfolded in and around their small house in the Latvian countryside. Today these images can be viewed perhaps as para-feminist (to use Amelia Jones’s term) because explicitly feminist critique did not emerge in Latvian art until the 1980s.
Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1965. Latvian National Museum of Art.
Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1965. Latvian National Museum of Art.
Zenta Dzividzinska. Page from a contact print book. 1966. Latvian National Museum of Art.