From Socialist Realism to the Stars: the Equidensites and Collages by Oleg Maliovany

Starting with the 2000s, the creative work of Oleg Maliovany, one of the representatives of what is deemed the first wave of Kharkiv School of Photography, got two different interpretations in the modern art history discourse in Ukraine.

On the one hand, Oleg Maliovany is represented as a photo artist specialising in nude photography since the photos of naked bodies make a big part of his works. Even in earlier solarizations from 1965–1966, modestly in most cases, but sometimes pretty explicitly,  naked and almost always female bodies start to appear in nearly every series by the photographer: in early montages, equidensites, colour «superpositions», collages as well as in Burnt Time (1979) and Dasha (1989-1990) series.

In 2017 in the Ukrainian Erotic Photography book, he was represented by seven photographs along with three other members of Kharkiv School of Photography —  Evgeniy Pavlov, Sergiy Bratkov and Roman Pyatkovka. Taking into account the formal ban on depicting a naked body in the USSR, the constancy with which Oleg Maliovany addressed this topic was unavoidably interpreted as a subversive, protest and political gesture. This assumption got its peculiar proof in the fact that Oleg Maliovany’s works weren’t let out of the country starting from 1976, and it was only through bypassing the post that he managed to send his works to international salon exhibitions. This is how the realisation of the likelihood of accidental repressions by the dictatorial regime smoothens down the confusion of a modern viewer, who finds it hard to find anything criminal in these photos, where a female body is always aestheticised and exploited in the classical role of a metaphor of beauty, unprotectedness and fragility.

Another image that unexpectedly for the author himself became dominant in the modern art field is connected with staged photo series that play a marginal role in the general mass of works by Oleg Maliovany.

These series are made up of a sequence in most cases shot with a static camera, in which a certain action obviously devoid of practical meaning is unfolding. In the series of poses, the paramount importance belongs to the theatrical plasticity of the models’ bodies, while the author’s idea (the relationship of a man and a woman in the Two in an Interior series, 1992, and the grotesque overturning of the clichés of masculine physicality in Blue Series, 1992) is conveyed only in a superficial way. It was those staged theatrical sequences that were selected by French curators to represent Oleg Maliovany’s works in the framework of the Crossing Lines exhibition in 2019 ¹From June 28 to December 27, 2019, the Crossing Lines exhibition that took place in PinchukArtCentre demonstrated a curator’s point of view on the phenomenon of Kharkiv School of Photography. What made that point of view even more special was the fact that it had a geographical and cultural distance from the object of contemplation: both of the exhibition curators were French professionals Alicia Knock and Martin Kiefer. The exhibition was held simultaneously with a large Boris Mikhailov retrospective..

However, both views on Oleg Maliovany’s creative work, despite being complementary to each other, keep us out of understanding what the role of this author in the history of photography is: the indispensable and dialectic link between his works and the late-Soviet aesthetics is impossible to describe in the terms of the dissidence/conformism dichotomic opposition.

Oleg Maliovany (born in 1945, in Rubtsovsk, Altai Krai, RSFSR) just like most of the members of the legendary “Vremia” group ²See more details on the Vremia group and the role of active photography community in the formation of the non-mainstream Kharkiv photography in the early 1970s in “Juri Rupin’s Photographic Paths” article by Nadia Kovalchuk, https://www.moksop.org/fotohrafichni–tropy–yuriia–rupina/. got an engineering education. After graduating from Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, Maliovany started working in his degree field, as a metal scientist at Stankinprom. However, after two years, he was already leading that plant’s colour photography lab. Officially he continued to be listed as an engineer, as there was no such position as a photographer at Soviet plants. Such a radical change in the job field wasn’t accidental, because ever since student times Oleg Maliovany worked as a correspondent of the Leninskie Kadry university paper. And it was even earlier that he mastered colour print technology and got so good at it that very soon he received recognition and got popular in Kharkiv. Since that time his life has been inseparably connected with photography in its various forms. He worked on illustrations for the Prapor publishing house, helped artists create portfolios for joining the Artist Association and worked as a photographer for the Institute of Soil Sciences for decades.

Still, he got the greatest recognition that reached the level of real popularity in the 1970s  as a photoartist. And he cultivated this bright image becoming an example for many photographers of the city dreaming of expressing themselves in the art of photography ³“ […] in the beginning of the 1980s, a cafe with a very weird name ‘Buchenwald’ appeared[…]. The atmosphere there was creative, and some exhibitions were held. Once there was an exhibition of Oleg Maliovany’s works […]. He used to come to that cafe with that shaggy hair of his, and there was a vivid image of an artist about him, not just of a photographer that simply took everyone’s photos with his camera.” See “Misha Pedan: All the Fears at the End of the Soviet Era Were Connected with the Fact that It Was Unclear Where the Danger Was Coming from”, Nadiia Kovalchuk, https://www.moksop.org/ynterv–iu–s–myshey–pedanom–vse–strakhy–v–kontse–sovetskoho–soiuza–b–ly–sviazan–s–tem–chto–neponiatno–otkuda–ydet–opasniost/. . 

Photography artist as a term implanted into the Soviet art history discourse requires a separate thorough study. It helps structure the system of Soviet photography aesthetics, understand its fundamental hierarchy and the dominating logic of Manichaean oppositions. Here we’ll just mark out the main lines for its definition, and to do this, we’ll need to consider the main ideas of the Creative Photography (Tvorcheskaya fotografia) monograph (Moscow, Planeta, first published in 1985)  by Sergei Morozov ⁴In the preface to his book Yesterday’s Sandwich, Boris Mikhailov mentions Sergiy Morozov, “I’d like to mention the conversation I once had with Morozov, a very famous critic in Soviet times, who was in charge of censorship in the sphere of photography. When he saw Superimpositions he suddenly yelled, ‘What’s that? That’s hideous!’ I replied that ‘the hideous’ is as well one of art categories. Morozov fell silent for a second and then said, ‘As long as I’m alive this won’t be demonstrated!’ And indeed in Soviet time that series wasn’t officially shown”. See Boris Mikhaïlov, Yesterday‘s Sandwich, Londres, Phaidon, 2006., an influential Soviet photography critic. The first thing that catches the eye is the borrowing of the concept of social development according to the historical materialism doctrine applied to the history of photography: from its very beginning, photography had to work its hard and thorny way to reach its accomplished state in socialist realism reportage ⁵The critic emphasises the major axes that guide the history of photography to the necessary and the only right path: “The creative work of three photographers, three personalities, — a Russian, Maksim Dmitriev, an American, Alfred Stieglitz and a French, Eugene Atget — in our point of view is what characterises the turn of photography towards the truth of life on the cusp of centuries.” See Sergey Morozov, Creative Photography, Moscow, Planeta, 1986 (the second edition), p. 117. He also complains about the shortsightedness of photography critics in the 1840-1860s: “The aesthetics was far from the artistic value of documentation or authenticity inherent to the nature of photography.” See Ibid., p.30. However, it is important to point out that “creative method of social realism”, according to Morozov, could be applied in other methods as well with the exception of candid photography: “Working with any photography method, Soviet photographers go beyond the principles of the social realism aesthetics. They find the standardized in the life of the society […], note something new that, if expressed in a visual image, shows the life of our people in the progressive advance towards communism.” See Ibid, p. 250.. On the way, photographers oscillate between two opposite poles: “the photography of life” and “picture photography”. It can be noticed that the transhistorical array of positive, synonymic and descriptive terms of the first one is “instant photograph”, “the truth of life”, “authenticity”, “non-staged reality”,  “realistic device”,  spontaneous, documental and candid photography. The opposite array consists of interchangeable signifiers like “photography artists”, “impressionism in photography”, “pictorialism”, “the old school”, creating a new reality, photo graphics, metaphorical form-creation, experimental, laboratory and fantastic photography. In Morozov’s analysis, everything that the second pole deserves is condescension and superiority shading into explicit hostility ⁶It is important to note, however, that adjectives “artistic” and “image-bearing” have a positive connotation in Morozov’s analysis but only when it comes to “life photography”.. That was the common attitude of the advocates of the official aesthetics, which characterised the whole field ⁷French sociologist Pierre Bourdeau defines a “field” as spaces “[…] in which agents taking part in cultural production are placed”. Besides, “Literary (and so on) field is the field of the forces that influence everyone entering the field in a different way depending on the position they hold[…]. At the same time, the literary field is also a field of competitive struggle aimed at conservation and transformation of this force field”. See Pierre Bourdeau, “Literary Field”, New Literary Review, № 45, 2000, p. 22-87. of late Soviet photography. A photo reporter differs from a photo artist not only in their attitude to reality. The viewpoint   of a photo reporter is more socially aware and thus is objectively correct in the historic perspective, which the critic tirelessly “proves” throughout the essay on the history of photography. 

However, in the late Soviet period, the manifestations that were alternative to the official “method” in art were rarely eradicated. Instead, according to the new cultural mechanisms stemming from the ideological crisis of 1959, they were hushed up and recuperated. The practice of “art photography”, a synonym of casual and innocent entertainment, continued to exist, even though on the periphery of that field. In the 1960s, the “art photography” was put up for a grilling by the country’s numerous photo enthusiasts. In its most sterilized examples, in which it is hard to find brave compositional or narrative decisions, it started to appear in the sole specialist photography publication, Sovetskoe Foto. Those works, in which the focus was shifted from the image objects to their formal and expressive qualities, were easily recuperated by the official information channel. And if the cause for publishing them doesn’t lie in the pretended pluralism and freedom of creativity, then it is in the techniques used,  the optics, the ways of development, solution recipes or other original methods, the attentive interest in which demonstrates the technocentricity, so typical of the late Soviet photography.

One of the reasons for the predominance of the technical problem in the Soviet photography scene lies in the general underdevelopment of local photography equipment and its uncompetitiveness in comparison with the photography industry of the Western Bloc. Due to the lack of quality optics and chemicals, all the actors of the photography life, from the editor of Sovetskoe Foto to a regular photo club member, were interested in the search and development of the means to improve the quality of photography, disguise the defects of the materials and make the photograph at least a bit more expressive. At the time when in the West the problem of improving photography equipment was lobbied by private interest of manufacturers, general negligence of the Soviet industry regarding home appliances makes photographers craft, fix, build and basically work using the bricolage method and directly accessible materials ⁸Of course, this statement is less relevant to photo reporters working for periodic publications and APN or TASS news agencies in which access to foreign photo equipment was much easier compared to that of ordinary citizens..

The creative work of Maliovany without any doubt was consonant with those common interests and the photo equipment struggle. In his Photographer’s Diary, Jury Rupin recollects in the first turn Maliovany’s mastery of various photography methods:

Oleg Maliovany […] influenced me a lot in this sense. By that time he had already been a rather well-known photographer and probably the only one, who had managed to master the extremely complicated process of colour photography. He was especially fond of all sorts of technical “tricks”, as he called them, which left a lasting impression on everyone with their originality and unusual brightness of colour. Each new work he brought to the photo club never failed to evoke admiration in all present ⁹Yuri Rupin, “Photographer’s Diary” [2009?], http://samlib.ru/r/rupin_j_k/dnevnik_fotografa-2.shtml..

Together with “direct” portraits, the first photo works that were important for him were connected with the search of the operations for conquering and transforming photo material. They constitute a row of individual works that weren’t structured in a series but were clustered in groups according to the principle of lab post-processing: monochrome (pseudo) solarisations and posterisations. Like in some other Oleg Maliovany’s 1970s series (Equidensites, Superimpositions, Collages), it is the lab technique used that became the central, lineal and distinctive feature. Most often these early monochrome works were individual (“Liza”, 1960, “A Posterised Portrait”, 1970, and “Liza-Zoom”, 1967) or double portraits (“August”, 1971, and “Thirst”, 1971) and in the latter, the compositional decision was always intended to defamiliarize the depicted persons, and they all at once acquire the features of monstrosity.

The brightest example of the correlation between the technical orientation of the Soviet photography and the creative work of Oleg Maliovany (which, however, right away demonstrates obvious limits of this kind of comparison) is the Equidensites series (1969-1975). It consists of works in the technique that gave name to the series. The impulse for its creation was given by two events: the encounter with the recipe of the equidensites, which happened in the middle of the 1960s in a photo magazine from one of the Western countries of the Eastern Bloc, and the impression from a Moscow exhibition at the end of the 1960s showcasing the photos of the outer space interpreted in the same technique. The major object of the photos from that exhibition was space, and that wasn’t accidental. The method itself was developed for scientific purposes, namely for better visualisation of the data in medical science and astronomy. The seventh issue of Sovetskoe Foto in 1971 informed that Agfacontour film made in West Germany got the first prize at the international exhibition of photo and cinema engineering achievements in Prague. The film significantly simplified the process of colour equidensities production in the sphere of scientific research and measuring equipment. Sovetskoe Foto says:

This film has found wide use in medical science, for instance. In X-ray radiography, it gives a whole range of benefits in comparison with photoelectric density measurement. The film is used in space research as well. In the processing of the shot of the reverse side of the moon, Agfacontour gave a more distinct picture of the numerous craters of volcanic origin ¹⁰Marina Bugaeva, “Intercamera-71”, Sovetskoe Foto, 1971 №7, p. 26..

Oleg Maliovany’s equdensites are a scientific technique adapted for a photographic statement. In this technique, every grey area gets a colour interpretation that hasn’t been copied from reality but set by the author. Of course, Oleg Maliovany never had access to the film produced in the West. That’s why in order to achieve a similar graphic effect, he would put together numerous black-and-white negatives, then transfer those compositions to a high-contrast photo film and then, at the last stage, to a flat stained glass film. Making a colour equidensity could take at least a week of eight-hour workdays of guessing and trial-and-error method. The Kharkiv audience was impressed with the saturation and contrast of colours that even “direct” colour photography lacked. The indicator of definite success was that Oleg Maliovany’s equidensites sold well to private individuals, which an average Soviet photographer or a photo artist never managed to achieve.

The results of Maliovany’s work with equidensites got recognition from the representatives of the official photography: in 1976, Sovetskoe Foto published the “Old Tallinn” equidensite (1974) at the back cover. The following year that work was featured in the great Moscow Interpress-Photo 77 exhibition at VDNKh and published in the Photo 77 almanack ¹¹Photo’77, Moscow, Planeta, 1979.. Even though Oleg Maliovany’s works didn’t cross the state borders starting from 1976, his mastery, inventiveness and interest in lab experiments and photography techniques resonated with the inside off-ideology problems of the Soviet photography field. Those unarticulated and unstated problems determine the direction of Oleg Maliovany’s creative work in general as well as the partial visibility of his separate works on the map of the official photography, despite his “formalism” and active practice in the sphere of nude photography.

Nevertheless, besides his congruence with the overall striving for improvement of the image quality and effect, Oleg Maliovany’s works were also defined by the criticised aspiration to create the distance with the world he photographs. What is more, besides the Baltic states urban landscapes, which were acceptable to the official aesthetics (“Tallinn Fairytale”, 1971, “The Old Tallinn”, 1974, “Kaunas 1” and “Kaunas 2”), among the equidensites there appeared portraits in which the topic of defamiliarization and monstrosity recurred (“The Age of Beauty”, 1973, “Phantom”, 1974) as well as the motif that can be found in other series and techniques by the photographer, that is the forewarning and presentiment of a catastrophe ¹²The analysis was performed based on the works that survived or were restored by the author. The major part of the equidensites and other works created by Oleg Maliovany in the 1960-1970s were destroyed in the fire at the lab of the Institute of Soil Sciences in 1979. In that lab, the author kept negatives and prints for a future exhibition..

In “No!-1” (1969) and “No!-2” (1971) the author doesn’t think beyond the particular space-time continuum, the imprint of which bears an image created by the mechanical eye of a camera. By performing manipulations with negatives and reactive chemicals in the lab, he imagines a new world in which space flattened to two dimensions is being built not with lines, shapes and volumes but with the interrelation of contrasts between the most unnatural, Fauvist colour stains. A female naked body in them, appearing as if from nowhere, breaks the modernist planeness of the image. Its obvious foreignness together with the pushing-aside gesture of the palms that are opened to the viewer and its nakedness that rhymes with vulnerability enhance the drama already stated by the loud colours. This anxious and even ominous tone as well as the constant presence of something unknown and potentially threatening in the fabric of reality contrast with the dogmatic aesthetics of the Soviet official photography no less than the fascination with the beauty of a female naked body.

The foreignness of the female body in the “No” equidensites is linked to the way it appeared in the image: it was surprinted with the help of optic montage on the background of abstract clouds and a sidewall of a building. Montage  (a technique of creating images with the use of optic manipulations in a lab), as well as collage (a technique in which glue and scissors are involved), was present in various works of Maliovany’s on a regular basis. In 1976-1978 he created a number of works in which collage became the primary technical principle. While the above-mentioned practice of combining a human figure with a potentially hostile environment appeared already in his early Tanya series, it became fundamental in 1976-1978 collages.

In 1976, the main news of the photographic Kharkiv was the Gravitation series newly created by Oleg Maliovany. The same year, the post stopped shipping the photographer’s works abroad, never giving an official explanation to that. Yet in the short period of time that had passed from creating the series till the shipping blockage, he had managed to take part in multiple international FIAP salons that were famous among the Soviet photo artists and receive numerous awards with his Gravitation series. Just like in the case with the equidensites, the extraordinary success of Maliovany’s collages with the audience is again proven by almost exclusive demand for them in the city’s improvised shadow photography market. 

Gravitation includes five collages: “Forefeeling”, “Gravitation”, “Boomerang 1”, “Boomerang 2” and “The Exodus”. In all of them, the central object is a naked female figure that’s sitting right on the ground in unusual poses. It turns out that in four of the collages those female figures are intertwined with one more faceless figure hidden behind the major one. And in three of them, its head is submissively bent down. In the “Gravitation” collage, the same figure is repeated as if in three various time fragments, getting further from the viewer diagonally with a perspective foreshortening and submerging deeper “underground”. While “a person” was stated as the main object of the official photography and “the formation of this person in a socialist society” — as the main topic, the heroines of Maliovany’s collages don’t refer the viewer neither to a particular person nor to their social roles but get abstracted down to a timeless symbol.

The action takes place in a fictional apocalyptic place where rampant storms rage and landscapes change from desert to rocky or cosmic ones. Despite all the ambitions, humans of the split atom and space flight epoch turn out to be still bent to submission by unresolved forces of the universe. While the Soviet mythology is built on the opposition of human and nature, where the latter is always the object that the hero of socialist work needs to harness, Oleg Maliovany brings in a two-sided view on the relationship with space: there is vulnerability and lack of control from the side of a human, yet, at the same time, permanent responsibility for affecting the environment. The author explains his interest in this topic partially with his everyday experience of an ecological disaster: dense smog was a constant reality of life in Kharkiv. Still, it would be wrong to call Maliovany a messenger of the ecological movement. For him, the question lies not in changing the role of nature’s “bad master” to the role of the “good” one but in the feeling of being a vulnerable part of the universe.

Despite a certain similarity to the NASA photograph, all the elements of these landscapes that are full of life of their own have an absolutely earthly origin: some of them were captured at the time of Soil Science Institute expeditions, others during a Crimean vacation, at Sivash lake or by Karadag mountain. To achieve the “cosmic” effect, Maliovany uses the optics that radically deforms the “normal” perspective, a Horizon panoramic camera that was released in the USSR in 1967 and an ultra-wide-angle Russar lens.

At that time, interest in wide-angle optics deforming the proportions of depicted objects and landscapes was common for Kharkiv photographers that wanted to go beyond the borders of the dogmatic language of Soviet photography. One of the factors contributing to this interest was, obviously, their acquaintance with the Baltic or, to be more exact, Lithuanian photography, in which photos taken with wide-angle lenses became quite widespread already in the mid-1960s. Panorama photography was the most radical expression of that tendency. For example, Evgeniy Pavlov used it in his Violin series (1972). Horizontal and vertical panoramas make up a significant part of Viktor and Sergiy Kochetov’s works. In By the Ground (1991) and At Dusk (1993) series, Boris Mikhailov for the first time uses panorama for documenting historical and social shifts in the country. For Oleg Maliovany, panoramas become an effective means of creating metaphoric and oniric topoi in which a world of ominous beauty unfolds.

The practice of that kind of world-fiction lab photography had quite a number of followers among photo artists in various countries at that time. Maliovany got acquainted with some of them through the catalogues of photo amateur salons and Polish or Czech photo magazines that were very hard to get. Creative work of Lithuanian photographer Vitaly Butyrin, who Oleg Maliovany personally met in 1971 on his trip to Lithuania, considered then the Soviet “West”, became pivotal for him. One of the most famous Lithuanian photo artists of his time, Vitaly Butyrin, just like another well-known Baltic master, Vilgelm Mikhailovsky, was renowned first of all for his photo collages that are usually referred to as “metaphoric”, “photo-fictional” or “surrealistic”.

Despite the thick walls of informational isolation, Kharkiv photographers also knew about works by their West-Bloc colleagues. Worth mentioning is Jerry Uelsman, whose collages were showcased in the Photography in the USA mobile exhibition that traveled through numerous Soviet cities in 1976-1977 ¹³Sergey Morozov’s comment on the montages by Uelsmann is typical of the Soviet critics: “Some of the foreign masters deliberately adhere to[…] idealistic program. Let’s take, for instance, famous American artist Jerry Uelsmann. Among others, there are two widely known shots belonging to him. In one of them, there is a handsome lady lying on the floor in some kind of enclosed space […]; a huge tiger is approaching her from the open door. This looks almost like a scene from a horror movie!” And the critic renders the verdict: “Rejection of the touch with reality, inherent to the nature of photography, is obvious.” See Sergey Morozov, op.cit., p. 356-357.. A consistent follower of “creative” photography, dedicated practitioner of fantastic montage and advocate of photographers’ right to interfere with their own negatives, in 1967, thanks to John Sharkovsky, he got an opportunity to show his works at a small personal exhibition in MoMA. In 1969-1970, Uelsman became a holder of the highly prestigious Guggenheim scholarship. Despite the dominance of “direct” photography among museum institutions and photographers ¹⁴From a text by John Sharkovsky, the curator of the Jerry Uelsmann’s exhibition: “Creative photography during the past half century has for the most part been based on the straight approach, in which the photograph is defined in the photographer’s eye at the moment the shutter is released, and in which darkroom manipulations that would basically modify that image are rejected. Jerry Uelsmann challenges this concept.” See the press-release of the exhibition: https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press–release_326497.pdf. , Uelsman is convinced that “the darkroom is capable of being, in the truest sense, a visual research lab; a place for discovery, observation, and meditation” ¹⁵Ibid.. Oleg Maliovany could take those words as referring to himself, just like the demand for photographers’ total freedom to change the elements of their own works as much as they like. An adherent of the idea opposite to the official Soviet aesthetics doctrine that photography, in which position of a photographer is always present, in no case is a model of reality, he refuses to view his works in terms of them being “photographic” or “non-photographic” and openly states an author’s active role in creating a photograph.

If one can draw a parallel between the collages by Maliovany and a range of photo artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain from the times of the first photo collages by Victorians Oscar Reilander and Henry Peach Robinson, then it will seem that their common anxious tone is connected with the reaction to obscurant optimism of the Soviet culture and finds its link to a transient yet powerful phenomenon of the “new” science fiction ¹⁶Leonid Heller, a literary critic, considers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Snail on the Slope (1968) to be “The sum of the searches, ‘the point to which all the lines of the power field of the new science fiction lead’.” See Leonid Heller, The Universe beyond Dogma: Reflections on Soviet Fiction, London, Overseas Publ. Interchange Ltd.1985, p. 255. or “warning science fiction” ¹⁷Ibid., p. 120. . 

Having lost the solid and well-defined basic concept of the world structure, the generation of the 20th Communist Party Congress was fascinated with hard science and science fiction. Starting with the 1960s, the Soviet book industry actively translated Western science fiction writers, such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Azimov, Clifford Simak and others. The general number of publications marked as “science fiction” increases by ten times ¹⁸“In seven years, from 1959 to 1965, 1266 sci-fi works of Russian and foreign authors were published with a total edition of about 140 million copies”. Ibid., p. 104.. Oleg Maliovany’s father, who was the head of a workshop at Kharkiv Tractor Plant and an amateur artist in his free time, cultivated his son’s love of science fiction. From an early age, the future photographer could find in his family library almost any sci-fi book or publication available at that time. The first author the photographer recollects is Clifford Simak, namely his novel The Goblin Reservation (1968), and Polish writer Stanislav Lem. However, starting with 1958, the year that Leonid Heller saw as “crucial” ¹⁹In 1959 the critics of Literaturnaya Gazeta came down in favour of the novel Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale by Ivan Yefremov. The same year, the debate started by Ilya Ehrenburg’s “Answer to a Letter” displayed the commitment of the Soviet youth to science in the search for answers to any questions about the universe.” See Ibid., p. 101-104. , an important movement for freedom from dogmas and clichés began in the Soviet science fiction as well.

Masterfully dodging the imperative of the “joyful grin” of social realism, some of the Soviet writers created authentic examples of comic science fiction (Ilya Varshavsky’s kind-hearted jokes about scientific optimism in his Molecular Cafe long short story collection, 1964) and even explicit social satire (the criticism of work of the system of central planning in Viktor Kolupaev’s Mindpower long short story, 1969-1970). There appears the rejection of the compulsory for that time explanatory role of an author (Gennady Gor’s Minotaur, 1967). Beyond the evolution time defined by historical materialism,  phycological and reflexive time is brought in (Olga Larionova’s A Leopard from the top of Kilimanjaro, 1965) and the discrepancy of the technical and social development is defined (Volodymyr Savchenko’s Second Expedition to the Strange Planet, 1959, Black Stars, 1960, A New Weapon, 1966).

So, the new science fiction suggested to the Soviet readers the precedent of the “expression of life” in art, the rejection of the conventionality of the ideological language and the freedom to pose questions that couldn’t be replied to with definitive answers. Creation of alternative worlds, suspension of optimism about the linear progress seen as something permanent and known in advance, as well as the rejection of faith in the impeccability of the modern model of technogenic civilization — those were the positions Maliovany shared with the sci-fi authors of the “new wave”.

Another important point of intersection between Oleg Maliovany’s creative work and the new science fiction lies in the fact that they adopt a common attitude towards the hierarchy of their creative fields. Just as well as science fiction authors, photo artists take the lowest positions in these hierarchies and the channels in which their works circulate are usually far from the mainstream: peripheral and youth-targeted magazines for the former ones and club exchanges and photo exhibitions of the latter ²⁰Some of the fundamental works for the Soviet science fiction by the Strugatsky brothers were first published in periodicals: Tale of the Troika was published in The Angara, in Irkutsk, and Snail on the Slope first appeared in Baikal magazine, in Ulan-Ude.. As it turned out, it was the “low” status that worked for the benefit of the both, allowing them to have a certain extent of freedom. Not engaged in any central institutes of creating ideological propaganda, photo artists and sci-fi authors experienced way less control, and the assessment criteria of their works were vague.

*** 

Out of all the kaleidoscopic creative work of Oleg Maliovany, only two groups of works were analysed in this article. Without doubt, they lie on the intersection of a number of influences: the “salon” aesthetics, the experimental photography that was popularised by the Amateur Photographers Federation restored after the war by the Subjective Fotografie movement and the memory about early avant-garde, leaking through specialized magazines from Czechoslovakia and Poland. Nevertheless, the realization of the complex internal process of acceptance-rejection of the Soviet culture with all of its evolutions that happened in the second half of the 20th century seems necessary today for recognition of uniqueness and courage of Oleg Maliovany’s creative work and understanding of his place on the map of photography history.

The author expresses gratitude to Oleg Maliovany for long, detailed and warm conversations.