Dr. Maria Garth presents "Nude Photography and Self-Portraiture in the Soviet 1960s" at the Feminist Art History Conference

Dr. Maria Garth shared her latest research on the photographic legacy of Zenta Dzividzinska in her talk "Nude Photography and Self-Portraiture in the Soviet 1960s."

The talk was part of the panel Images of the Female Body as Resistance at the Feminist Art History Conference on September 26, 2025. The conference was organized by the American University, Katzen Arts Center, Washington DC.

Abstract:

Set against the backdrop of the rise of nonconformist art and growing indifference to the official aesthetic style of Socialist Realism, this paper analyzes women artists’ motivations for creating nude photography and self-portraiture in the Soviet Union. Working in Latvia, the photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944-2011) entered the profession as a young woman and began to explore the conceptual underpinnings of self-portraiture, representation, and the nude body in photography. In the Late Soviet era, even as political reforms brought about cultural changes in Latvia, the professional experiences of women artists were shaped by gendered power dynamics and systemic inequities. In the 1960s, Dzividzinska experimented with the photographic medium to pioneer artistic practices that challenged sexist depictions of feminine bodies and the trope of the ‘female nude’ seen through a male gaze. As a counter to such representations, she sought more dimensional ways of engaging with individual subjectivity from the perspective of the self. Despite their significance to her practice, these photographs remained hidden in the photographer’s archive for decades. Most were not publicly exhibited until recently because such forms of personal expression were highly controversial at the time they were produced. For Dzividzinska, self-portraiture became one way of combating the pervasive idealized and eroticized imagery of the nude female body produced by her contemporaries and throughout the history of art.

A slide from Dr. Maria Garth's talk "Nude Photography and Self-Portraiture in the Soviet 1960s."