Masha Ivashintsova

Masha Iur’evna Ivashintsova

(1942- 2000)

Description:
Mariia Iur’evna Ivashintsova spent her formative years in Leningrad during the 1970s and 1980s, participating in the city’s unofficial cultural life and establishing relationships with leading figures such as the poet Viktor Krivulin and the photographer Boris Smelov. It was Smelov who gave her the Leica IIIa camera she used to capture multifaceted moments of everyday life. Many of these small fragments of her own and other people’s memories re-emerged after Ivashintsova’s death when her daughter Asia Ivashintsova-Melkumian rediscovered her negatives and began to make the images public. Asia described her mother’s photography as having a “central place in our home, it never seemed significant — taking photographs, for my mother, was like breathing. I also just always assumed that the photography was helping my mother to get through life, I never thought that it was something special” (cf. Stewart 2018).
Masha Ivashintsova was born in Sverdlovsk, today Ekaterinburg, on 23rd March 1942. She moved to Leningrad in 1944 with her mother and grandmother. From 1961 to 1969 she attended the Faculty of Theatre Studies at the Leningradskii gosudarstvennii institut teatra, muzyki i kinematografii (Leningrad State Institute of Theatre, Music, and Film), specialising in acting and directing. One of her favourite directors was Peter Brook, who had presented two plays in the USSR: Hamlet in 1955 and King Lear, which Ivashintsova saw in Leningrad, in the spring of 1964.

Belozersk, Vologda, USSR, 1979. Photo by Masha Ivashintsova.

In 1964, Ivashintsova met and married the Armenian-born linguist Melvar Melkumian with whom she had her only daughter Asia Ivashintsova-Melkumian a year later. After Melkumian moved to Moscow with their daughter in April 1969, Ivashintsova travelled between Moscow and Leningrad until 1974, when she met Boris Smelov on one of the trains on the route. Their meeting was followed by the most intense and fruitful phase of her artistic production. During this period Ivashintsova had several odd jobs: she was a correspondent for the magazine “Teatr” (Theatre) from 1970 to 1986, a librarian, cloakroom attendant, lighting technician at the Teatr Iunogo Zritelia (Youth Theatre) and a lift operator.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Ivashintsova began a tormented love affair with the underground poet Viktor Krivulin, evident from their correspondence (cf. Kurmanaev 2013: 168-204).  Krivulin wrote to her: “Of what I wrote, it is not the verses themselves that appeal to me, there is something totally different there, which probably only you and I can understand, unless you have plunged into a complete oblivion of everything that bound us” (cf. ibid.: 172).
Thanks to Krivulin and Smelov, Ivashintsova gained access to Leningrad’s ‘Second Culture’, and attended meetings of intellectuals held in the city’s apartments. However, she kept her photos and poems hidden for decades.
In December 1981, following a bout of severe depression, she was sent to Psychiatric Hospital No. 6 on Obvodnyi kanal, an institution to which she was re-admitted several times over the course of ten years. Mariia Ivashintsova died from a serious illness in Saint Petersburg in 2000; her daughter was with her.
Exactly seventeen years later, among boxes piled up in the attic of their Saint Petersburg home, Asia and her husband Egor discovered thirty thousand negatives carefully wrapped in paper with notes, poems and letters from her mother. “I would have never been able to enter that room without Egor, my husband. Masha was silent with me, cheerful with others. Now I faced a new process of getting to know my mother, through her photographs” (cf. Iaccarino 2021: 37).
The secret archive turned out to be a trove of unique photographs, telling stories of stolen moments, devoid of political connotations or social categorisation.
The nature and significance of Ivashintsova’s seeming remoteness from politics and lack of overt criticism of the USSR, was elucidated in a post on Facebook, dated 29 January 2019, on a page managed by Egor and Asia: “Media sometimes describe Masha’s photography as political and ‘anti-soviet’, sort of an active statement against the Soviet Union. That’s not the point. Yes, her photographs were very different from those photographic standards, which were imposed by the Soviet state at the time (happy factory workers, smiling mothers, sporting achievements, etc.). They also lacked all the socialist grandeur. But they were not a political statement. Masha was never political in what she was doing, regardless of what she had to go through because of that political regime. To her, politics was irrelevant — and that was already a crime big enough in the eyes of the Soviet state”.
In our brief correspondence, Egor was keen to reiterate that “Masha’s work is far from politics, ‘social realia’ and the ‘problems of the USSR’. Maša’s work is about love. There is tenderness, dismay, and love in the faces of the subjects of her photographs. In her shots there is no ‘painful struggle for truth’, no posing, no desire to insist on something, typical of ‘professional photographers’ and many heroes of the ‘Soviet underground'”.
The human being, in their spontaneity, is the undisputed protagonist of Ivashintsova’s work: whether she was capturing smiling or sullen children, families in moments of conviviality, passers-by, crystallised gazes, individual portraits or collective images. Different stories intersect and Ivashintsova is a witness. The cornerstones of her photography, are not only animated beings, but also objects that she brings together in plastic still lifes and landscapes, devoid of all artifice, in a Leningrad that changes so much over the decades that it transforms into another city, becoming once more Saint Petersburg as a new era dawns.
On the photographer’s official website, there is a section Ulicy Leningrada (The Streets of Leningrad) where a concatenation of images of the city, divided in a temporal sequence from 1961 to 1999, reveals a very varied urban iconography, that is alternately snowy, crowded in times of festivity, frenetic and bare. In addition to Leningrad, Ivashintsova took a great many photos in Moscow and many images are glimpses of cities seen in passing while travelling, in Georgia, Belarus, Armenia, Lithuania and the Ukraine.
The outside world juxtaposes with intimate photographs of the people closest to her, the protagonists of her life and memories: Asia as a child, close-ups of Melkumian, Krivulin and Smelov (such as the images exhibited at the photographer’s first solo exhibition in 1975 at the Dom Kul’tury ‘Vyborgskii’), moments from dinners in the flats of Leningrad friends, such as during Tat’iana Goricheva’s farewell party in 1980, and images of deep introspection including self portraits in a mirror. The lighting is always natural, the camera always the Leica IIIa, which broke in March 1990, only to be replaced by the others of the same model, until the purchase of an automatic Leica mini II in 1998.
Love is at the centre of her work and also the substratum of her poetic verses, in a quest that at times seems exhausting:

“More love; / more love, / give me love. / I was suffocating / in the cold. / Oh, it’s cold / everywhere! / Love is / rebirth”[1].

In a continuous play of light and shadow, her verses reflect the light and resound through the dark spaces of reality, revealing unspoken things, distances, and the depths of the soul:

“You and I will never meet, ̶ / we have no address or telephone number. / And you are so distant and unfamiliar, / how could you know / the Babylon / I was cast into by my sick ravings, / about my dismal fate, / about life’s fateful crossroads… / An eclipse of reason and then the snowy platforms, / where I wated for you, – / where we could have been. / Ill intent, / a legal error, / we can never be. / We never met, / That’s my answer to the doctor… / And those hard carriages, / where you wonder alone / Covered in snow…”[2] (Trans. by Matthew Hyde 2019).

Masha Ivashintsova’s poems are collected in a short 1993 anthology entitled Bezmolvnye stikhi (Silent Verses). Some pages were printed for the photo exhibition with the title Chiaroscuro, which took place from 4 December 2019 to 1 March 2020 at the Juhan Kuus Documentary Photo Centre in Tallinn. Chiaroscuro was not the photographer’s only international solo exhibition: Ivashintsova’s works were also shown in New York in 2018 at the International Center of Photography under the title Masha Ivashintsova, Street Photographer and in Bydgoszcz, Poland, in 2019 as part of the 4th Vintage Photo Festival under the title Masha Ivashintsova – Brought to Light. The set-up of the New York exhibition,  involved projecting the photos onto the windows of the building, so that the images burst into the lives of those passing by.
Ivashintsova’s artistic production can be viewed on the website https://mashaivashintsova.com/ and on the Facebook page of the same name thanks to the efforts of Asia Ivashintsova-Melkumian and her husband Egor who continue to dedicate themselves to scanning and publishing the rediscovered negatives.

Notes

[1] Cf. the original version: “Болбше любви; / болбше любви, / дайте любви. / Я задыхалась в холоде. / У, как везде / холодно! Любовь есть / возрождение”.

[2] Cf. the original version: “Мы никогда не встретимся с тобой, /  ̶  Нет адреса и нету телефона. / И ты далёкий и такой чужой, / Откуда знать тебе. / В какие Вавилоны. / Забросил бред больной. / О сумрачной судьбе, / О перепутьях судеб… / Затмение и снежные перроны, / Где я ждала тебя, /  ̶  Где мы могли бы быть. / Злой умысел, / Судебная ошибка, /  ̶  Нам никогда не быть. / Не встретились с тобой, / Вот и ответ врачу … / И жёсткие вагоны, / Где ты один блуждаешь / Весь в снегу…”.

Marta Capossela

[31st December 2022]

Translation by Marta Capossela

Bibliography

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