Järjekord. Üks episood Tartu fotoloost / The Queue. An Episode in Tartu’s Photo History
Järjekord. Üks episood Tartu fotoloost / The Queue. An Episode in Tartu’s Photo History is an exhibition about an exhibition. The bilingual catalog (Estonian and English) with texts by Indrek Grigor, Adam Mazur, and Alise Tifentale was co-edited and designed by Alexey Murashko. It was published by Tartu Kunstimuuseum in 2023.
From art critic and co-author Indrek Grigor:
This book, which offers a glimpse into the photography of the 1980s in the Soviet Union, includes documents about the history of the exhibitions, a selection of works by Estonian photographers who participated in the Soviet Union-wide exhibition contest “Women in Photographic Art,” and a brief insight into the role of nudity in the Estonian media of the 1980s. The latter draws from the miraculously preserved archive of the “Edasi” newspaper’s “Summer Woman” photo contest.
The archival material compiled in the book is complemented by Indrek Grigor’s overview of the “Woma [sic!] in Photographic Art” exhibition series’ history, an article by Latvian photo historian Alise Tifentale that focuses on the 1977 exhibition of women photographers in Riga titled Women with Cameras, and an essay by Polish art historian Adam Mazur, which discusses the legendary exhibition series Venus in Krakow, which also inspired the Tartu exhibition.
On March 3, 1983, the Tartu Photography Club opened in Tartu Art House the first exhibition in the series Women in Photographic Art. It quickly became one of the most popular events in the history of exhibitions in Tartu, with a total of five episodes. Women in Photographic Art reached its peak popularity in 1989 when it was visited by 24,000 people over four weeks. The stories of the queues outside the Tartu Art House are the initial impetus for this book and the preceding exhibition.
Erotica was frowned upon in the public sphere of the Soviet Union, and organizing an exhibition featuring nudes required some political manoeuvring. In response to this, the political sentiment during the period of re-independence included a somewhat carnival-like opposition to the Soviet Union, including its puritanism. With the growth of media freedom, such as the publication of the Maaja magazine in 1989 and featuring nudity on the front page of the Edasi newspaper, the exhibition Woman in Photographic Art lost its value as a rarity, and it waned in the machinery of capitalism of the 1990s.
The approach to the design of the book could be described as a retrospective speculation on Estonian visual aesthetics of the late Soviet era combining both affective and decadent modernist type with noticeable traces of the broad nib pen, very present in Estonian graphic design during the second half of the 20th century, and the rationality and at the same time poor naïveté of the geometric modular faces of the late 1980s. It is very peculiar how two typefaces (Tercia and Platelet) created in absolutely different cultural and geographical contexts could complement each other and the graphical composition of the cover so well.
The book interior features two more families used for body setting and captions (Atlas Grotesk), and for marginalia and running headers (Arnold), both supporting the Cyrillic script occasionally appearing in the publication along with the main text in Estonian and English. All four corners of the book were rounded matching the features of the Platelet and the cover’s pattern.
