The central place in Yuriy Rupin’s photograph “Kharkiv Woman” [1] is given to a young girl standing full-length in contrapposto on a spacious city street. The grayness of monotonous high-rise buildings and a typical Soviet ZIL-164 cargo truck (“Zakhar”) accentuate the free posture, eroticism, and even a certain audacity of the heroine. She is smoking a cigarette and does not look into the viewer’s eyes: her dreamy and confident gaze is directed to the left. The wind blows her brown sheepskin coat, revealing slender long legs to the viewer. The heroine wears a short dress and fashionable high black boots.
This was Kharkiv in 1977. At that time, Rupin worked as a photojournalist; he built his photography career precisely through reporting activities. Therefore, straight photography constitutes a significant body of his works from the 1970s–1980s. Obviously, “Kharkiv Woman” is the result of such documentary exploration but also simultaneously a certain departure from it.
Art historian Tetyana Pavlova writes that at that time Rupin used a “wide-angle lens” for shooting, which caused certain perspective distortions that radically changed proportions, for example, reducing the size of the head relative to other parts of the body [2]. In this photograph, disproportion also exists: the emphasized figure of the woman is significantly larger than the car or the building behind her. Her legs look longer than the upper part of her body.
“These perspective distortions, combined with distortion characteristic of Soviet lenses of this type, carried hidden shock value, mockery, when a hand with a wrench became a monstrous dominant feature of the ‘worker’s portrait’,” Pavlova noted [3]. We do not know whether this woman worked at a factory or belonged to Kharkiv’s technical intelligentsia. But we cannot take our eyes off her. She seems like the owner of the city. Her clothing and style are not flashy, but they say a lot about inner confidence, strength, and freedom.
“The image of comrades in Soviet iconography appeared quite often. Knitting needles — tools of labor or murder. They are the Moirai. Kitsch was in favor then, and it was a tribute to kitsch,” Yevheniy Pavlov described one of his photographs depicting two naked women in nature. Pavlov carefully covered their genitalia by drawing green leaves on them.
Most often, the models of Kharkiv photographers were women, who were mostly photographed nude in the genre of nudes or “acts” — as Kharkiv photographers called it.
Tetyana Pavlova, Nadiya Kovalchuk, Halyna Hleba, and Alina Sandulyak wrote about corporeality in Kharkiv photography. However, the body was mostly considered as a method of speaking about the political and social of that time, as a juxtaposition of something harsh and strong — to something beautiful and delicate. “The claim to the right about women in photography was caused by protest against hidden and explicit castration in society and art,” explained Tetyana Pavlova [4].
The body in Kharkiv photography acted as a means of conveying thought, as a background against which an expression was formed; or as plasticine through which a message was created. There was no difference — both male and female bodies were objectified; “native” and close, or, conversely, alien. In fact, as researcher Alina Sandulyak clarified, “by exposing their own bodies and using them as symbolic tools, artists sought to expand society’s understanding of human capabilities and rights to self-expression. Through the naked body, protest was expressed” [5]. The human body, composition, technical and artistic techniques — through all this, artists formulated their expressions, or, as Nadiya Kovalchuk noted, there was admiration for the fragility of beauty in the forms of the female body [6]. “In the series, we allowed ourselves personal, subjective expression. When photography was synonymous with objectivity — our position looked like a challenge,” said Yevheniy Pavlov [7].
In Rupin’s photographs, as in those of other authors, there is indeed a lot of naked female nature, but most of these shots cannot be called erotic. And all the more so, one cannot speak of the woman as a subject. However, in Rupin’s oeuvre, it is precisely “Kharkiv Woman” that conveys the necessary emotional, erotic tension and dramaturgy. This is almost the first time when, through the camera lens, you see not “plasticine” in the form of a body, not an impersonal “beautiful” texture, but the heroine herself, her character and emotional state. But the main task was not to create a psychological portrait but rather a portrait fixed in a certain time. It is worth explaining this phenomenon with the phrase of Mikhailov himself, who believed that “it is not important how to show, the main thing is to show in time” [8]. In this photograph, one can definitely notice the time — it is in the car behind, in the unglazed balconies, in the brown sheepskin coat, and even in the averted gaze of the woman. If this heroine appeared before the viewer naked, she would not have so much frankness and dramatic sharpness that the late stagnation period suggested. In fact, a similar idea about fixing time is expressed by Yuriy Rupin in his semi-documentary novel “Photographer’s Diary in the KGB Archives.” On behalf of a fictional photographer hero, he describes his practice as follows: “At the last photo club meeting, Rupin brought photos of naked girls he shot this summer. I don’t know, maybe these girls are beautiful, but in Rupin’s photos, this is not noticeable. He shoots these girls in a boat, on a bicycle, near a round table in a room and says he doesn’t shoot them to make a beautiful photo but to find true beauty. He says that true human beauty is usually hidden under clothes because clothes are made according to fashion, and fashion changes from time to time, and there is nothing funnier than a photo of a woman dressed in fashion that existed ten or twenty years ago. And on a naked woman, there is no fashionable clothing; her body remains beautiful always, regardless of what she wears on it [9].
Rupin’s “Kharkiv Woman” was classified by the authors of the special issue of the magazine 5.6 as an “image of the average person.” Emphasizing the anthropocentrism of Kharkiv photography, the authors singled out the theme of the ordinary citizen in a separate category: “The center and content of the shots was a person in various aspects: bodily, ontological, aesthetic, anti-aesthetic […] The focus is not on the rich, but not poor, not beautiful, but not ugly — a person like everyone else from the gray mass. On the one hand, the heroization of the simple person was still critical and often ironic; on the other — it was an appeal to the existential, deep side of existence” [10].
Andriy Sakharov wrote in his 1977 text “Anxiety and Hope” about the USSR: “Now all this — ugly and cruel, tragic and heroic — has gone beneath the surface of relative material well-being and mass indifference. A caste, deeply cynical and, as I believe, dangerous (for itself and all humanity) sick society has emerged, in which two principles rule: ‘blat’ (a slang word meaning ‘you to me, I to you’) and life quasi-wisdom expressed by the words — ‘you can’t break through a wall with your forehead'” [11]. In the photographs of Kharkiv artists of the 1970s–1980s, the “average person” had already adapted to such “blat” relationships. It did not matter whether woman or man, all these characters were ordinary people whose everyday life was literally identified with grayness. It seems that for this reason, artists additionally colored photographs of that time, adding optical, mechanical, and technical inclusions. For example, in her dissertation, Nadiya Kovalchuk cites a formalist example from Oleg Malovany’s practice. The author notes that “nude in its various expressions — in color, photomontage, in ‘folds’ [12] — became central in his plastic experiments” [13]. According to her, the artist confronted the female body with a “hostile urban environment” [14]. A similar conflict was present in Rupin’s work, who in his photograph “Night” contrasts the beauty of the naked female body with the eerie urban night.
Analyzing female corporeality in Kharkiv photography, one should look at the series of works by Roman Pyatkovka. His cycles with women, created in the late 1980s, depict witches raging in a communal apartment. However, this rage is only demonstrative. In his optics, a conflict also arises, but it concerns the intimate and public, more precisely the repressed private in the environment of total Soviet public and communal control. “It should be understood that at that time the absence of photo studios led to the mastering of private space when small apartments became testing grounds for our creativity. As a result, the subject of reflection and research became personal and even intimate life,” Pyatkovka said [15].
For Pyatkovka, the body is also a means and a way by which the artist builds any story: about war, about evolution, about philosophy. “I work with the naked body, but that does not mean it always has to be erotic and sexual. I simply create my own sign system, my own semantics from bodies,” he added.
In Mikhailov’s work, the internal dramaturgy was “a guide to the awareness of the absurdities of the public.” His works are characterized by irony bordering on pain and rupture. Most often, this rupture and absurdity manifested precisely through the introduction of an ordinary person into the photograph, mostly a woman. Such a telling woman was in Boris Mikhailov’s “Red Series,” who sat without panties on a red Soviet flag. She also invites us to look at herself through the emancipated image of a “revolutionary woman” whom the state brought to such a “narcotic” state.
The average person of the USSR era found themselves in the 1990s not very prepared for new commodity-money relations. On the one hand, the transitional period woman desperately adapted to these changes and relationships. On the other hand, she became a victim; her image acquired tragic features and the pain of personal loss or fracture. If earlier tragedy in Kharkiv photography was read as the inability to resist the system, as submission or apathy, then the drama of the 1990s is a deep personal and social trauma that manifested during the period of political dichotomy. In the 1990s, nudity ceased to cause surprise, the body ceased to be perceived as plasticine for formulating subjective vision; it was reinterpreted as a commodity. Although not yet as an investment, which would come later. The corporeal no longer surprises anyone and evokes completely different emotions. Participants of wild capitalism, let alone the emancipated female image seen in Rupin’s “Kharkiv Woman,” are out of the question.
A similar character is the heroine of Yevheniy Pavlov’s photograph from the “Archive Series,” created accidentally in one of Kharkiv’s kitchens. The photo depicts a woman sitting in an openly confident pose. She is dressed, but through the unbuttoned blouse, the lace of her underwear is visible. This woman either engaged in music or worked in theater. Ultimately, Pavlov never saw her again. The photograph was made in a manner not quite typical for the artist’s documentary style and somewhat stands out from the visual series of his 1990s works. However, due to this atypicality, it strongly resonates with the theme of searching for new heroes that took place at the beginning of the new decade.
Serhiy Bratkov offers a different perspective in his series “Princesses” (1996), in which he made portraits of women who turned to a reproductive center. “They all really wanted to have children. It’s about how everyone dreams of conceiving from princes, but it turns out — from soldiers,” Bratkov once commented [16]. What provokes in the portraits? The very topic of reproductive violence and stigmatization of childlessness (there was even a tax on it) was traumatic for post-Soviet society. It is not shocking that these women sit having removed their panties, but that they openly decided to declare their personal problems. In an interview, the artist reflects on the paradigm shift: if in Soviet times there were characters, then in the 1990s there were heroes; now heroes are gone, and contemporary art moves toward collectivity and abstraction. Bratkov’s Princesses are those new heroines who were not afraid to show their faces and speak about the painful issue of motherhood. They speak about the sexual and corporeal through deep social problems.
However, returning to Rupin’s “Kharkiv Woman,” her inner freedom and openness raise the question: where did this female self-confidence disappear? Why did the heroines of Perestroika, the 1990s, and the 2000s lose these traits? Here one can talk both about the absence of active female artists in the city and about the city’s very character. “Every place has its own biochemistry. We are made of water. In Kharkiv, it is very hard. And where the water is hard, probably there are reasons for people to be tougher,” Pavlov commented in a private conversation.
Only Vita Mikhailova stands out with her confident gestures, bold thoughts, and ideas from the general male world; she participated in the activities of the “Rapid Response Group” in the early 1990s.
We see some similarity with Rupin’s heroine much later in the works of Kharkiv native of a completely different generation, Alina Kleitman, particularly in her video cycle “Super A” (2014–2015), where provocation became an artistic strategy. Kleitman’s heroines are “women running after wolves”: chthonic, emotional, tough, authoritative, and uncompromising. As the author herself noted, she “reads” them from social clichés, personal experience, observations, mass culture, etc. Kleitman’s character is a post-Soviet woman who broke free from “blat” relationships and is more focused on herself and her own benefit, peace, and enrichment. If a man stands next to her, his position is always insignificant and worthless. Kleitman’s imagery contains as much provocation as the works of Kharkiv photographers, but unlike them, she does not choose the female body as a formal opposition to the city, system, or political order — she, together with her heroines, is ready to confront external problems with her own body and works. This inner need for struggle is obviously also a response, a challenge to a society that still exists in a patriarchal dimension and time of political perturbations.
Until 1990, women were practically absent in the photographs of Kharkiv artists. Despite the fact that women often served as models, photographers were more interested in their bodies, which they used to create their own stories, convey themes and ideas. What one of the authors of Kharkiv photography called the creation of his own sign system from bodies is now read through feminist discourse as objectification of women. Instead, the woman as a heroine appears in the photographs of Kharkiv artists in the early 1990s when the authors were searching for new themes, heroes, and imagery. Moreover, this is the time when women become co-authors of collective works and actively participate in the creative process. Only in the 2000s did the female artist boldly declare herself, creating individual provocative statements. By the character of her works and temperament, Alina Kleitman logically continues the Kharkiv aesthetic, expanding it through feminist discourse and themes.
