4/1/2021 Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska | post https://post.moma.org/entering-the-elusive-estate-of-photographer-zenta-dzividzinska/ 1/27 Central & Eastern Europe | Art and Gender Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska Alise Tifentale March 24, 2021 Art historian Alise Tifentale considers the difficulties of preserving and interpreting the legacy of Latvian artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011). In the 1960s, Dzividzinska was one of the few women photographers in Riga whose work was highly regarded in the local and international photo club culture. Her most significant contribution is a collection of images capturing the daily life of three generations of women living in a small house in the country. These photographs have remained largely unknown until recently. This essay highlights the sociopolitical and cultural motives for such neglect and suggests avenues of further research of the artist’s estate. The jar of blackberry jam from the summer of 2010, the last batch my mother ever made, still sits in the fridge in my Riga apartment. As far as I know, my mom, Latvian artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska (1944–2011), chose the garden as her place of creativity and comfort, especially after her husband—my father, painter Juris Tifentals (1943–2001)—had passed away. Quite opposite to the clean and orderly rows of her garden, the state of her artistic output at the time of her passing was that of utter chaos. Among the reasons for such disarray were three decades of neglect, followed by two decades of attempts, in response to random requests from a few curators and researchers, to pick out “something interesting” from her archive of negatives, vintage prints, and documents. Now, almost ten years after my mother’s death, I have returned to Riga to enter the storage unit, to try to bring some sort of order to the contents of the numerous boxes, and to make her archive available in its entirety.