Until very recently, says Boris Savelev, the common view in the West was that there was no such thing as Soviet photography. Except, of course, for the ubiquitous smiling workers and collective farmers, feisty Young Pioneers, and noble mothers in the Soviet press. Indeed, the only area of the Soviet Union where serious photographic societies existed was the Baltic, Lithuania in particular - and there, too, the view prevailed that Russians were simply incapable of being good photographers, and hat there were no real photographers in Moscow.
"Perhaps, to a degree, there weren't," says Savelve's wife, Elena Darikovich, "until you and I came along…"
Tall, sinewy 42-year-ld Savelev is living proof that a different kind of Soviet photography does exist. His passion for photography goes back to his school years. Although he attended the Aviation Institute and worked as an engineer, in 1982 he abandoned that career to become a full-time photographer. He headed the amateur Moscow Photo Club, and worked as a free-lance photographer - making portraits, taking pictures of artists' works (it was "very boring," he says, but he was able to remain faithful to his principles). Darikovich, a slender, elegant, rather bohemian woman in her late thirties, who considers herself primarily a painter, eventually came to share her husband's calling. She had been interested in photography before, working in a photo lab and studying just about the only magazine with quality photography available in the Soviet Union, The Czech Review.
The 'Underground'
Savelev and Darikovich refer to themselves and to other art photographers of their generation as the "underground" of Soviet photography. Not that there is anything political or "anti-Soviet" about their work. "Photojournalism and art photography," says Darikovich, "are opposite poles (which is not to say that a journalistic photo cannot sometimes produce an artistic effect)." To Savelve, "Pure, nonprogrammatic art must be free of symbolism." Some of his works - a picture of Lenin hanging on a door next to a squalid-looking sink, for instance - may be seen as an acerbic commentary on official Soviet ideals; but Savelev's interest is in the immediacy of the image, the composition of shapes and forms, the interplay of light and shadow, of whites and grays and stark black lines, the white mesh of a curtain on a door that stands ajar. A political program of any kind forces the photographer into a straitjacket, Savelev believes; these restraints "prevent you from fully concentrating and expressing that which sometimes comes upon you at the oddest moments. You create your own world, and politics has no place in it."
He names American photographer Walker Evans as one of the artists who has influenced him most; but if Evans' 1930s photographs of Great Depression victims in the rural South had a strong social content, Savelev and Darikovich deliberately eschew any such "message" for the pure image. "Pure photography," adds Darikovich, "does not capitalize on exotic or sentimental subjects such as American Indians, or children, or animals. Art critics have yet to develop such a criterion of 'purity' for judging art."
Stale Brezhnev
In the stale world of the Brezhnev-era USSR, where the state demanded not only
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