Abandoned Land and the Brickcity Blues. Estonian Photography in the Eighties
	Pille Epner

	A city is not so much houses and streets, as the space between, above and inside them, and the inhabitants of that space. Man creates an environment around himself that then has an impact on him. Photography is an indispensable medium that fixes and visualises this mutual effect, whether the aim of taking pictures is the 'objective' recording/documenting of the environment, or an attempt to find answers in everyday life to one's inner perceptions. The city space and man-made artificial environment in a broader sense was one of the favourite topics of Estonian photography in the 1980s. By following this line and nothing else, it is possible to have an idea of the changes that occurred both in the attitude to photographic art and to the surrounding environment. As commonly known, the eighties were, in that sense, a unique period, and therefore the changes, too, were quite radical.
	Neo-romantic mainstream The mainstream in Estonian photography in the 1980s has been called escapist neo-romantic. While in official circles the greatest virtue of photography was still considered to be 'realism', 'verity', 'closeness to life', artists using photography at that time picked up the habit of avoiding temporal-spatial specificity completely. This constituted their protest against the rigid, ideologically established pictorial truth, where standard places and topics prevailed. In his article 'Multilayered sociality', Andres Rünk spoke up against that tendency: "...we keep producing pictures that are undetermined in time and place; we have sacrificed concreteness to symbols, and done this in art with the strongest documentary elements!? I look at the dull title of a picture, for example, Landscape 23, and can't help wondering why this kind of vagueness is not replaced by an ancient Estonian place name, or why a picture of Old Town doesn't bear the name of the street and the number of the house." He accuses young photographers of 'asociality' and calls their work 'science-fictional photography'. This is a good example of the conflict, going on for years, between 'sociality' and 'drawing-room style', 'documentalists' and 'aesthetes' that was unable to solve the problem of photographic art's specificity until the late 1980s.
	Becoming 'arty' The neo-romantic photographers of the 1980s purposefully shattered the illusion of photography's objectivity, both by escaping from the social sphere or via various photographic manipulations that turned the photo (stressing the act of its creation) into a 'visible' medium and moved it closer to graphic art or painting. The favourite device of photographers of that generation was the colouring that broke up the usual tonal experience, but also other deformations of the negative or the picture surface. The neo-romantic photo manipulations of the 1980s essentially differed from the incessant technical experimentation of the two previous decades. At that time, people were getting rather tired of the widespread centricity of form and the forced attempt at innovation in Estonian photographic art. The new generation of photographers abandoned the capturing of 'decisive moments' with ambitions for symbolic depth that had become clichés, and relied mostly on superficial associations: dramatic castle ruins symbolising sublime monumentality, mysticism and secrecy; emphatically static views of the slums and abandoned farmhouses were replaced by occasional details and everyday situations; the mood became more chamber-like, more lyrical and human. Suggestiveness emerged instead of allegory.
	Spacemen The nameless derelict houses and poorly lit courtyards in the slums (e.g. Malev Toome's series Wooden City, and Toomas Kalve's pictures of Soup Town) offered romantic and timeless space poetics. These photographs were coloured and 'softened' by Vaseline glass. Social reproach is completely lacking here, the viewer is faced with an aesthetically beautiful, dreamlike world. Such sunny 'vague' pictures were also favoured by Mart Viljus in the mid-1980s. Although these were (mostly) pictures of a certain condition, creating slightly abstracted semi-symbolist images, their reality, which contained occasional foreshortenings, already exhibited a new moment in perceiving the environment. The city was no longer a monument, but a constantly changing multi-layered organism, created by people, things and movement, which could never be fully perceived. Such a subtly sensitive shift or stress in world perception is reflected in Eve Kiiler's series Park Motifs (1984), depicting views of park architecture. By placing negatives on top of one another and intertwining the details, the specific physical world becomes a vague world of patterns. The usage of simultaneous points of view refers to direct participation, blending into the environment; on the other hand the series reveals the multi-layered essence of the postmodern era.
	Chance, accident, movement The polytextuality and multiplicity of meaningful layers, typical of the modern urban environment, found a remarkably more eloquent means of expression in the series by Peeter Sirge (In a Strange City, 1984), Arvo Iho (The Brickcity Blues, 1984), Meelis Lokk (In the Old Town, 1985) and Peeter Langovits (An Incident in a Strange City, 1987). The common denominators here could be 'movement' and 'chance'; instead of stylised and carefully composed 'nice little pictures'; each of these photographers offers a whole series of detail-abounding pictures that seem to have been taken as if in passing. The method of presenting a series creates an illusion of the passing of time; the city is seen in movement - in time and space. The emotional connection of the photographers with this environment is, however, different. With Lokk and Iho this is rather strong and personal. In the case of Lokk, the wide-angle lens and an illusion of movement create the feeling of direct participation; the photographs of the other, both visually and conceptually (multi-) layered, give the impression of momentary visions or jazz-like emotional improvisations. The form language of Sirge's photographic series, on the other hand, is rather reserved and of modest expression, compared to the others. They nevertheless exhibit a sense of beauty and vivacity typical of the Estonian photo of the 1980s, also stressed by the colouring of the pictures.
	Jüri Okas - a phenomenon Jüri Okas is a phenomenon in his own right in Estonian photography. The pictorial language of his architectural photos balances on the border of modernistically poetic and postmodernistically conceptual, feeling equally at home in both contexts. For most of the photographers mentioned above, the city was primarily the mediator of their own inner perception, also exerting an influence on them. Okas, however, an architect himself, is interested in architecture and is happy to act as an observer himself. He does not distort or idealise his surrounding environment, but rather appreciates its originality and uniqueness, characterised by the balance between order and disorder, constructiveness and destructiveness, beauty and ugliness, rationality and irrationality. His photos, taken between 1974 and 1986, of anonymous objects, designed rather by time than by the architect, reached the exhibition hall as late as 1992, under the title A Small Dictionary of Modern Architecture. After another three years, they were published as a book. Despite his objective manner, Okas cannot be taken as a socially critical artist; his subtle perception of beauty instead reveals the sensitive nature of an aesthete.
	Hidden landscapes Okas's photographs of 'ugly' architecture connect with the topical mood of the late 1980s, when photographers started to record decay, desertion/desolation, ruins and bleak everyday life - all that escapist Estonian photography had ignored for years. Favourite objects were the abandoned Soviet military bases with their unreal atmosphere that had been strictly hidden from strange eyes, as well as from the camera. Ann Tenno's photographs of Prussia (1986) were poeticised views of the crumbling environment; Peeter Linnap's Hidden Landscapes (1988), Mart Viljus's Abandoned Land (1989) and Jüri Liim's series (all depicting the former Soviet military constructions) clearly represent the idea of documentation belonging to a new era. The photographer becomes an observer and a chronicler who approaches his environment without passion and partiality. The spirit radiating from the environment itself is even more impressive, and such pictures thus inevitably become meaningful signs, both politically and socially.
	From mysticism to concept Between the early 1980s and early 1990s, Estonian photography underwent a swift development from pretty, 'mystical' and 'trick-abounding' pictures to conceptual documentary photography, whereas most of that period was characterised by light, chamber-like neo-romantic moods. Similar changes can also be perceived in the altered attitude towards the urban environment that was so important to photographers throughout the period, initially in the visual sense, but increasingly associated with social consciousness in the late 1980s. The human-centred world view had been abandoned earlier, and photography started to perceive the surrounding environment more broadly and in many different ways.
	| Estonian Art 2/01 (10) | Published by the Estonian Institute 2001 | ISSN 1406-5711 (Online) | ISSN 1406-3549 (Printed version) | einst@einst.ee | tel: (372) 631 43 55 | fax: (372) 631 43 56 |