Genovefa

A series of self-portrait photos which depict scenes from the author’s great grandmother’s Genovefa’s life. Genovefa was the wife of a Communist party official and acclaimed Soviet author and poet, Ignats Muižnieks. The author gathered information about her through a family photo album, stories heard while interviewing her friends and relatives and, most importantly, her diary. The photo series portrays one specific entry written on the 1st of January of 1957, which reads: “What should I do? What should I do? What should I do? What should I do?”.

Genovefa, like many other Soviet women of that time, lived an unhappy life, dealing with infidelity, abuse and terminal illness. This project aims to examine and illustrate the issues that women in the Soviet Union faced in the second half of the 20th century.

Elizabete Eglinska (2002) is the winner of this year’s FK Prize for young Latvian photographers. She is from Liepāja, where she has studied photo design at the Liepaja Music, Art and Design Secondary School, but now she is a student of scenography at the Latvian Academy of Arts.