A Tale of Two Cities: Leonid Tsypkin’s Street Photography

• In Event: Visual Media at Face Value: Non-Professional 20th-century Portraits and Photographs

Abstract

Perhaps best remembered for his novel Leto v Badene (Summer in Baden-Baden; 1982), Leonid Tsypkin (1926-1982) traveled throughout the Soviet Union to photograph locations connected to Dostoevsky’s biography and fiction. This paper compares two albums, one of Leningrad-Petersburg, and the other of Moscow. Through these albums, Tsypkin manipulates the cultural legacy of Dostoevsky while implicitly embedding himself into these urban memories as the photographer. Even though both albums follow Dostoevsky’s life and presence in two historic capital cities in Russia, I argue that the formal differences between works illustrate a difference in meaning: if the Leningrad album underscores Tsypkin’s identity as a Jewish artist in the Soviet Union, the Moscow album concerns Tsypkin’s everyday identity as a doctor. Photography, as Tsypkin’s chosen medium and artistic practice, allows Tsypkin to experience and convey his sense of prosaic self, preserved by and configured through the discrete and intentional form of the album.

Author

• Eric Kim, Stanford U