Guest lecture "Understanding Machine-Made Images from Photography to Generative AI" (January 26, 2024)

“Understanding Machine-Made Images from Photography to Generative AI: Collaborative Exercise in Response to Flusser, Azoulay, and Manovich” is a guest lecture and seminar that I was invited to deliver at the Art Academy of Latvia, January 26, 2024.

Background image above and below: details from Unknown photographer, [Occupational portrait of a woman working at a sewing machine] Daguerreotype, ca. 1853. Library of Congress collection, https://www.loc.gov/resource/ds.04496/

Together with doctoral students at the Art Academy of Latvia, we read and discussed excerpts from the writings of Vilém Flusser, Ariella Azoulay, and Lev Manovich. At the end of the seminar, the students collaboratively wrote a speculative manifesto “What is the role of photography and AI-generated images today, if today is 2124?”

Among other things, we also discussed the concepts of technical images and machine-made images as well as guessed whether a given image is a photograph or AI-generated image.

Francis Grice,  photographer. [Unidentified man and woman, seated, facing front] Daguerreotype, ca. 1855. Library of Congress collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004664531/

Participating in the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) conference in Philadelphia

With great excitement, I participated in the ASEEES (Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) annual conference in Philadelphia, PA, on Saturday, December 2, 2023.

Panel participants at the ASEEES in Philadelphia. From the left: Josie Johnson, Alise Tifentale, Maria Garth, Liāna Ivete Žilde, and Līga Goldberga. Photo: Alise Tifentale.

In the role of a discussant, I was part of the panel, "Informed Bodies: Decolonizing the Politics of Representation in Late Soviet Photography," together with Josie Johnson (Stanford University) as the chair, and presenters Līga Goldberga (Art Academy of Latvia/University of Latvia), Liāna Ivete Žilde (Art Academy of Latvia/University of Latvia), and Maria Garth (Rutgers University).

Two of the three presentations - papers by Līga and Maria - discussed the legacy of the artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011). To me, his was a very special panel both professionally and personally, as I’m Dzividzinska’s daughter and also the curator of her archive and estate, Art Days Forever (www.artdays.net).

Brief description of the panel

“This panel focuses on the representation of women as models and photographers in late Soviet photography of the Baltic region from the 1960s and 1980s . Relying on theoretical approaches informed by gender studies, the posthumanist perspective, and critical theories such as postcolonial discourse, this panel investigates the notion of the “informed body” from three distinct vantage points: the body of the female model in nude photography and self-portraiture; the body of the photographic archive that holds traces of its biography; and the body of knowledge regarding the production of the history of photography. These “bodies,” oppressed by the Soviet cultural policies and/or societal norms, have remained invisible long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Decolonizing the politics of representation requires revision of patriarchal art canons through the illumination of women photographer’s archives; acknowledgement of the cultural diversity of the USSR by studying non-Russian regions such as the Baltics; and adding nuance to Western art photography discourses by attending to regional specificities of post-Soviet photography. Through close readings of artists’ works and examination of the circulation of their archives, the panelists analyze the gendered condition of photography and the politics of discovering and inscribing photography from the late Soviet Union into broader art-historical narratives.”

Click here to find more information about the panel and the participants on the ASEEES conference website!

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Discussion following the presentations. Photo: Josie Johnson.

Find out more about this panel!

Read more on the Art Days Forever website - https://www.artdays.net/news/aseees2023 - including more photos from the presentations, full abstracts of all three papers, and more!

Book review: Katrīna Teivāne. "Roberts Johansons. Zeitgeist and Photography"

Alise Tifentale, “The Long Road Up Against the Stream” (Tālais ceļš augšup pret straumi). [Book review of: Katrīna Teivāne. Roberts Johansons. Zeitgeist and Photography (Roberts Johansons. Laikmets un fotogrāfija) Riga: Neputns, 2022.]

Book review published in: Art History and Theory (Mākslas vēsture un teorija) 27 (2023): 87-89.

Download the book review PDF here (Latvian only)!

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to review the latest book by my dear friend Katrīna Teivāne, titled Roberts Johansons. Zeitgeist and Photography (Roberts Johansons. Laikmets un fotogrāfija) (Riga: Neputns, 2022). It is an extremely well-researched and elegantly written monograph about one of the most important photographers in Latvia, Roberts Johansons (1877-1959).

The book is available at the publisher’s website, https://www.neputns.lv/products/laikmets-un-fotografija-roberts-johansons, as well as in the ISSP online store https://shop.issp.lv/products/roberts-johansons-age-and-photography

The review was commissioned by the main art history journal in Latvia, Mākslas Vēsture un Teorija, and is published in its vol. 27 (2023).

Find out more about the journal Mākslas Vēsture un Teorija, vol. 27 (2023).

Photos from the book opening at the National Library of Latvia in Riga, May 2022.

Katrīna Teivāne (on the right) and myself at the opening of the book in May 2022.

The following two images are from the Facebook album of the book publisher Neputns (more photos here).

The author of the book, Katrīna Teivāne (left) and myself (right).

I had the honor to congratulate Katrīna and say a few words about the book as well as some of the difficulties that pose a challenge to photo historians.

New essay: “Women with Cameras: Providing Erotic Entertainment for the Male Audience While Working as Photographers"

Alise Tifentale, “Women with Cameras:  Providing Erotic Entertainment for the Male Audience While Working as Photographers,” in The Queue. An Episode in Tartu’s Photo History, edited by Indrek Grigor and Alexey Murashko. Tartu: Tartu Art Museum, 2023: 82-93.

Download the article PDF here!

The article was commissioned in 2022 by the curator Indrek Grigor on the occasion of the exhibition he organized titled The Queue. An Episode in Tartu’s Photo History (November 5, 2022—February 12, 2023) at the Tartu Art Museum.

Abstract:

“The exhibition is aimed to serve as an impulse for further development of photographic art in our republic, especially among women. (. . .) Women already have proven that they are, and can be, capable photographers, and this exhibition undoubtedly proves that one more time,” wrote Jānis Kreicbergs (1939–2011), a Latvian photographer and member of the Riga Photo Club, in the catalogue of the international photography exhibition Woman with Camera [Fotografē sieviete], which he organized in Riga in 1977. The condescending tone (“women have proven”: to Whom? Why? How?) characterizes the heteropatriarchal field of photography in Soviet Latvia and across much of the transnational photo-club culture at the time. This essay focusses on the exhibition Woman with Camera, which also included works by Estonian women photographers. The aims of this essay are 1) to offer a tentative feminist critique of the Soviet postwar photo club culture, 2) to outline the historical origins of that culture, and 3) to highlight a few sociological and cultural advancements that this culture achieved despite its blatant sexism.

I have chosen the exhibition Woman with Camera as the case study in this essay for several reasons. Firstly, Woman with Camera was arguably the most widely publicized international photography exhibition of the decade in Latvia. Secondly, it presents a unique and complex set of issues: on the one hand, it reflects the dominant worldview of the photo-club culture and manifests the desires and fantasies of straight middle-aged men. On the other hand, it does so—paradoxically—through the work of women photographers. Highlighting such paradoxes helps us better understand what is really at stake: it may be less important to know whether a “man” or a “woman” holds the camera than it is to examine the societal and cultural context in which they operate, the kinds of images they produce and who benefits from their activities. Thus, I argue, the exhibition Woman with Camera did not so much demonstrate the creative output of women photographers as reveal what kinds of images by women photographers were deemed acceptable in the photo-club culture of the time.

Finally, I would like to clarify that my discussion of Woman with Camera in this essay is based mostly on secondary sources: publicity materials of the exhibition and selected works reproduced in the press. The lack of primary sources is among the obstacles that hinder further research. For example, today it is impossible to reconstruct the exhibition Woman with Camera in its entirety. I have not succeeded in finding any images of the installation at the Museum of History of the Latvian SSR. Photographing exhibitions for future reference was not a common practice in the 1970s, and even the show’s organizer, Jānis Kreicbergs, did not have any photo documentation of the actual installation. The exact works are unknown because the catalogue lists only the names of the participants and the countries they represented: 220 prints by 77 women photographers from 11 countries (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, Italy, Poland, Romania, Switzerland, the USA, the USSR, and West Germany).

Click here for more information about my essay, the publication, and the exhibition!

New article and new research direction: "Photography Without Images"

Just published in December 2022! New article and new direction in my research:

Alise Tifentale, “Photography Without Images: A Proposal to Think About the Medium as Practice, Apparatus, and Form of Social Interaction,” in Latvian Photography 2022, edited by Arnis Balčus and Alexey Murashko (Riga: Kultkom, 2022): 152-171.

Download my article as a PDF here!

Abstract:

In this article I propose to think about photography without images, i.e., focusing on the medium as practice, apparatus, and form of social interaction. Based on concepts created by Pierre Bourdieu, Vilém Flusser, and Lev Manovich, among others, this article attempts to depart from the image-centered, art-historical approach to photography that has dominated this field so far. Instead of repeating the romanticized narrative of “great” or “important” images and their “talented” makers, this article proposes to look beyond the images’ surface and examine unpublished or deleted photographs in archives and on social media, the significance of darkroom work and collective or shared authorship, photography on the NFT art marketplace, and the role of AI and automation in photographic production. The article discusses the work of photographers, artists, digital creators, and social media content producers such as Sultan Gustaf Al Ghozali, Caroline Calloway, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Zenta Dzividzinska, Alan Govenar, Ivars Grāvlejs, Lucia Moholy, Emma Agnes Sheffer, Alnis Stakle, Sophie Thun, and others.

Talk at the seminar "Likeness in Difference. Perspectives on Baltic Regional Art History" in Tallinn

Thrilled to think and write about my recent archival research discoveries: my talk “Invisible Photography: Discovery and Interpretation of Zenta Dzividzinska’s (1944-2011) Archive” in the panel discussion "Invisible Photography" was part of the seminar "Likeness in Difference. Perspectives on Baltic Regional Art History in Tallinn, Estonia, May 14, 2022.

The panel was chaired by Annika Toots, and the participants were Alise Tifentale, Agnė Narušytė and Annika Toots.

Download the seminar program as pdf here, and find out more about the seminar on the Kumu Art Museum website.

Photo courtesy of Jana Kukaine.

Seminar “Likeness in Difference. Perspectives on Baltic Regional Art History” took place in the Estonian Academy of Arts and Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia, May 13-14, 2022. It brought together art researchers and curators from the three Baltic countries—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Art history of the Soviet period served as the point of departure for the seminar.

Photo courtesy of Inga Lāce.

The abstract of my talk, “Invisible Photography: Discovery and Interpretation of Zenta Dzividzinska’s Archive”:

I'd like to propose the topic of invisible photography—such as photography that has survived only in negatives—in the broader context of preservation and interpretation of Soviet-era women-photographers' archives. Focusing on a case study of the private archive and estate of Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011), a Latvian artist and photographer active locally and internationally in the 1960s, I'd like to speak about the cultural, social, and political circumstances that had rendered her work invisible until very recently.  At the center of Dzividzinska's legacy is a vast collection of 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 as well as self-portraits and collaborative work produced together with other young female artists and art students while she studied at the art school in Riga. She was misunderstood for most of her lifetime, and only since the 2000s her legacy has begun to attract interest from art historians, curators, and contemporary artists. But one of the main challenges for anyone who would be interested in her work is that it is invisible. Museum curators or collectors typically are interested in “great” artworks—they look for large-size, excellent quality, well-preserved vintage prints ready for framing and exhibiting. But Dzividzinska did not make many exhibition-size prints during the 1960s. Her most radical work at the time was not thought of as exhibitable, so it exists in small test prints or only in the form of negative because Dzividzinska not always had the time and resources to produce any prints at all.

Learn more about life and works of Zenta Dzividzinska: www.artdays.net

Photo courtesy of Šelda Puķīte.

Watch my presentation and the following discussion on YouTube:

Watch the lively discussion that followed our panel:

Browse the slides from my presentation: