IGOR SAVCHENKO
AND CONTEMPORARY BELARUSIAN PHOTOGRAPHY
Welcome to this digital collection of Contemporary Belarusian Photography, the largest US-based digital archive of visual works produced in Minsk in the 1980s–2010s. The collection includes more than 1500 images of visual and textual works created by Igor Savchenko, a key participant of the socio-cultural phenomenon known as the Minsk School of Photography.
In the second half of the 1980s, the Minsk School gradually grew out of a photo workshop that was supervised by Valery Labko, a prominent figure and educator in the field of photography and visual education in Belarus. For many members of the workshop, photography was a welcomed distraction from their daily jobs as technicians or engineers.
By the end of the 1980s, with perestroika in full swing, some of these amateur photographers abandoned their professional careers and embraced photography as their full-time activity. Two crucial international exhibits—New Soviet Photography in Helsinki in 1988–89, and Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR in 1991 in Baltimore—put them on the art world’s map under the name of the Minsk School of Creative Photography or, more simply, the Minsk School.
The Minsk School challenged thematically and artistically ossified conventions of late Soviet quasi-documentary photography, preoccupied with portraying socialist development and achievements. Focused mostly on the private life of ordinary people, Minsk photographers brought back modernist traditions, which were suppressed by the socialist fascination with realism: blurred focus, sharp angles, multiple exposures, textured or overpainted surfaces became the norm.
One of the most striking features of the Minsk School was its active engagement in the 1990s with the visual legacy of the Soviet period. Many of these retroactive projects were politically charged, yet almost all of them preferred to remain ambiguous and open-ended. There was no radical rewriting of the Soviet past in these photos, but there was no erasure of it either.
Instead, these artistic reappropriations of the visual legacy of socialism subjected available photographic materials to multiple (pre-digital) transformations––be it cropping, enlarging, segmenting, coloring, or montage. Found photographs are selected, combined, and visually transformed, producing a post-factum archive of the period that is past. Photographic records were reactivated and reappropriated as sites for intense aesthetic and social interventions.
Among the members of the Minsk School of Photography, Igor Savchenko is, perhaps, the most internationally acclaimed artist, with the most diverse body of work. A native of Minsk, he studied cybernetics and automatic control systems at the Belarusian State University of Informatics and Radio Electronics in the 1980s, and had a brief career as an engineer afterwards. In the late 1980s, Savchenko joined the Labko photo workshop, and already in 1991, the Galleri Index/Fotograficentrum (the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation) in Stockholm hosted his first solo exhibition.
In 1985–1996, Savchenko produced a large body of remarkable photo-series and single photographs, which dramatically shaped the field of contemporary photography in Belarus, establishing the artist as an iconic figure of the Minsk School of photography. Despite his overwhelming success, Savchenko decided to abandon photography altogether in 1997 and focused on various text-based and mixed media projects instead. He returned to the photographic medium in 2006.
In 2023, the artist drew the bottom line under his engagement with photography, announcing “the final and irreversible refusal to take pictures.” Four years earlier, in October 2019, all negatives of Savchenko’s work from 1985–1996 were mechanically destroyed by Darius Vaichekauskas, an artist from Klaipeda (Lithuania), during the Deconstructing Igor Savchenko performance in Minsk.
The PUL collection Igor Savchenko and Contemporary Belarusian Photography: Reimagining the Visual includes most of the works created by the artist in 1985–2017. The digital archive was donated to Princeton by Igor Savchenko in 2022 and 2023. The gift was enabled by extensive fieldwork that the anthropologist Serguei Oushakine has been conducting in Minsk since 2009. Throughout 2022–2024, the archive was organized and prepared for publication by Anna Meerson, a Library Collections Specialist, and Thomas Keenan, the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Librarian at Princeton.
