Independent editor and curator duo from Latvia focusing on photography-based research and activities — Vladimirs Svetlovs and Anna Volkova.
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PROGRAM
March 12, 2026 — March 26, 2026
Book launch for Rīgas 17, Stenči
Maxim Boxer Gallery
A photography studio rivals perhaps only a restaurant in the number of important life events it marks. From the 1910s to the 1980s, the photo studio in Strenči welcomed its “pilgrims” mainly on happy occasions, leaving black-and-white imprints on their lives. What of that happiness can a smile on a glass negative revive today? Maybe the place is a vessel of memories, rather than the photograph?
EXHIBITION
November 22, 2024 — June 1, 2025
Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum
Dedicated to the link between the creative experiments of the naïve art photographer Jānis Gleizds (1924–2010) and the scientific surgical research of the Soviet Latvia time, the exhibition intertwines subjects like disability and Soviet erotica, the aesthetics of a medically transformed body and the first steps toward social acceptance of the divergent into a single cohesive story.
BOOK
Published February 2026
This photobook is dedicated to a significant building in Strenči (Latvia) where a renowned photo studio operated continuously for more than 70 years.
The historical appearance of the studio interior has not been preserved; however, individual elements and eyewitness memories make it possible to imagine the course of the important event of photography itself.
The publication includes photographs of čthe studio’s current interior, images of preserved studio furniture, as well as photographs from historical glass negatives from the 1920s–1940s, drawn both from the collection of the Latvian Museum of Photography and from materials that remain to this day in the former studio premises.
PROGRAM
January, 2025
Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum
Photo by Elena Vlasova
During the exhibition Gleizds, Paper, Scissors, we sought to engage with the ideas of the sexologist Jānis Zālītis—who was known for his progressive thinking on intimacy and human relationships—by exploring his views on the connection between the creative and sexual faculties in human life through a performance of the lecture “On the Eroticisation of Family Life,” alongside a presentation of Jānis Gleizds’s colour slides.
BOOK
Published May 2024
Jānis Gleizds (1924-2010), the official photographer of the Traumatology and Orthopaedics Institute of Soviet Latvia and a distinguished figure in Photo Club Rīga, crafted skillfully constructed images using a unique “invasive” approach.
The photobook "Gleizds’ Method" offers an intriguing portrait of the artist, showcasing his mastery of photography techniques. Documented through test prints, retouched double positives, and collaged negatives, his process reflects the meticulous nature of his work, shaped by his professional milieu.
EXHIBITION
August 25, 2024 — September 1, 2024
Strenči Photo Studio Pop-Up, Rīgas 5, Strenči
Photo by Baiba Zvejniece
Correspondence Club mail-art exhibition that collated letters containing photography and drawings sent to Strenči by correspondents from Latvia, Estonia, Poland, France, Belgium, Greece, Portugal and the USA.
PROGRAM
May 2024 — NOW
photo by Thomas Vandenberghe
In spring of 2024 year, responding to an invitation from the Strenči Photography Workshop, the Belgian photographer and mail art enthusiast Thomas Vandenberghe began a visual conversation with artists from Latvia.
more >
EXHIBITION
August 27, 2023 — September 3, 2023
Historic premises of the photographic studio, Rīgas 17, Strenči
While going through the Strenči glass plate collection at The Latvian Museum of Photography a series of portraits taken in the studio caught our attention. The images featured a whimsical background – a spruce tree perpetually falling. The faces in the photographs changed but the spruce kept on falling, suspended in mid-air somewhere over the shoulders of the people of Strenči.
The exhibition showcased objects found on the former Strenči photo workshop premises and offered a display of portraits taken once in the photo workshop as well as The Glass Mobile a work consisting of the glass plates made during the Strenči Dry Plate Workshop
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PROGRAM
August 2023
Strenči Photo Studio, Artist residency Zemitāna 4, Strenči
During the workshop, participants explored the history of dry-plate and glass-plate photography, learned the chemistry of emulsion coating, and worked hands-on with these historic techniques. They created images on glass plates, experimented with large-format cameras, and produced photographic prints using traditional contact printing methods — closely following the practices of photographers a century ago.
The weekend workshop took place in the very location where, one hundred years ago, photographers of the Strenči Photo Workshop documented local life — from formal portraits and road accidents to the scenic banks of the River Gauja and even solar eclipses.
BOOK
Arcadia. Gardens in common
by Anastasia Tsaider
Published February 2022
”Arcadia. Gardens in common” by Anastasia Tsayder is a photobook that reconsiders Soviet modernist microdistricts as living post-Soviet landscapes shaped by memory, neglect, and transformation. Through images made across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Tsayder shows how vegetation has overtaken once-utopian architecture, turning planned “garden cities” into ambiguous spaces of refuge and loss. The book treats these neighborhoods not simply as failed utopias, but as environments where new meanings emerge after systemic collapse. As Tsayder notes in the interview, these spaces become places “where one can escape the societal pressure, be left on one’s own, find a refuge from the commercialized urban environment,” revealing Arcadia as both a record of disintegration and a search for new forms of belonging.
BOOK
1st edition published November 2019
Collaboration with Latvian Museum of Photography
“Glass Strenči” is a book about what was possibly the most visually documented settlement in interwar Europe.
PROGRAM
January 8-12, 2021
Pop-up, Bar Alex
4 evenings during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, on-line lives from a closed bar on the outskirts of the Riga city
The exhibition and accompanying talks dedicated to the modernist dream project held in the now-closed bar “Aleks,” located in the “Tallinn” shopping center, built in 1974 on the outskirts of the city in the Jugla residential district.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition and talks could not take place as originally planned. Attendance was limited to the curator, with artists arriving individually, along with an evening host (either a DJ or talk participant) and a videographer.
BOOK
Published November, 2017 — September, 2021
Collection PUBLIC SPACE
The Public Space book series is devoted to public spaces in Soviet Latvia and demonstrates various approaches contemporary authors take when working with the idea of the past—from long-term research into public architecture to different ways of engaging with photographic heritage. These include restructuring archival materials, staged photography, and thematic photo projects, including one the author has been developing over a period of 50 years.
more about “Palladium” by Andrejs Strokins >
more about “Centrāltirgus” by Māra Brašmane >
more about “Rīgas Līcis” by Vladimir Svetlov >
more about “Baltic Postcards” by Owen Hatherley >
BOOK
Schema
by Alexander Gronsky and Ksenia Babushkina
Published May 2018
The authors Alexander Gronsky and Ksenia Babushkina present their book as an exciting play on the perception of space and time. Its nature is exceptionally photographic and feeds on the history of photography and peculiarities of contemporary digital picture-taking. The book consists of diptychs and triptychs shot between 2005 and 2015 in different countries across the world, including Russia, Japan and Azerbaijan.
BOOK
Published December 2014
A book-magazine published once every hundred years, where artists engage with texts and images to create contemporary legends of Riga.
Includes series by Latvian photographers Gunars Binde, Romans Korovins, Andrejs Strokins, Vladimirs Svetlovs, Finnish photographer Henrik Duncker and Estonian photographer Krista Mőlder as well as artworks by Pēteris Līdaka and Maija Kurševa.
Texts have been written by Sergejs Timofejevs, Aleksandrs Zapols, Pauls Bankovskis, Vadims Agapovs and Paavo Matsin. Memories about Anatols Imermanis were shared by Jānis Rokpelnis and Gunārs Binde but TALKA’s author Stanislav Gorecky has contacted Friedrich Zander by using the newest digital communication forms with the finest matter.