Zenta Dzividzinska

Zenta Dzividzinska was born in Code Parish,* Latvia, in 1944. From 1961, she studied at the Riga Secondary School of Applied Arts and graduated as a master artist in 1966. While studying there, she attended a photography course taught by the notable Latvian photographer Gunārs Binde. Meanwhile, under the influence of her teacher, artist Kārlis Sūniņš, she developed an interest and comprehension of avant-garde forms of artistic expression.
*Code - pronounced [tsuo’de]

She continued her education in the preparatory course of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic State Academy of Art (1965–1967). From 1967 to 1993 she was a creative artist and designer at the state-owned company Māksla (“Art”). During the 1970s she was mainly involved in professional applied graphic design, utilizing a variety of photographic techniques in collaboration with photographer Valters Jānis Ezeriņš. She participated in applied graphic design and poster exhibitions in Riga and Moscow (1971–1976). Since the early 1990s, she has also designed several art exhibitions and has worked as a book artist and photography editor.

Dzividzinska joined the Riga Photo Club in 1965 which at the time was the main creative hub for photography in Latvia. Also in 1965, she held her first solo exhibition, “Riga Pantomime,” in the main art bookshop of Riga, “Mākslas grāmata” (Art Book).

Between 1968 and 1972 she participated in local and international photography exhibitions. During this brief but prolific time, Dzividzinska became known for her images of women, atypical for Latvian photographic art. Photographs such as Alone (1967) or Self-Portrait (1968) stood out sharply against the predominant male perspective that favored images of women as pretty and submissive objects. Dzividzinska noted that “In the mid-1960s, Sarmīte Kviesīte and I were the only young female artists in a company of men.”

Dzividzinska has experimented with the creative possibilities of photogram, photomontage and optical distortion, and has tried out the techniques of staged photography. At this time she created her Riga Pantomime series (1964–1966), consisting of black and white, partially abstract, expressive photographs, mostly capturing the rehearsals and backstage moments.

Her photographic work from the 1960s, however, was soon forgotten as Dzividzinska focused her effort on design work and did not continue to exhibit with the Riga Photo Club.

Nevertheless, since the early 1960s, Dzividzinska continued making a collection of documentary photographs under the title House Near the River, recording snapshots of everyday life in her ancestral home in a village where she grew up and where she returned to live with her husband, painter Juris Tifentals, at the end of the 1960s.

Most of the photographs from this collection have never been exhibited or published, and many have never been even printed. A few were first published and exhibited in her second solo exhibition, Black and White, in Riga in 1999, curated by art historian Inga Šteimane.

This exhibition was followed by another exhibition where archival images were mixed with more recent images from the House Near the River series, called I Don’t Remember a Thing in Riga, 2005. The exhibition was followed by an eponymous photobook (2007). Although the exhibition and photobook was met by a certain critical acclaim, it did not bring a notable change in the general perception of her work. In an art and photography scene, still dominated by a few notable male photographers, Dzividzinska’s idiosyncratic style and the autobiographical approach to the photographic medium still has not found a visible place.

Dzividzinska died in Riga, Latvia, in 2011.

In 2021, part of the archive of her negatives (some never developed, many never printed), vintage prints, contact prints, selected exhibition works, notes, and documents found a safe and permanent home in the collection of the National Library of Latvia where this collection is researched and curated by art historian Līga Goldberga.

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