TRIVA Manifesto — is a trio of Soviet photographers Vladimir Vorobyev (Владимир Воробьев), Vladimir Sokolaev (Владимир Соколаев) and Alexander Trofimov (Александр Трофимов), who were actively working between 1970–1982. They were located mostly at Kuznetsk Metallurgical Plant and its surroundings. They were employees of the factory with a keen interest in photography.
The manifesto the photographers agreed on stated the following:
- No post-processing
- No staged photographs
- Nonintervention
The latter is very unusual for the Soviet state photography. Ninety percent of the visual materials, including newspaper photographs and documentary films, were heavily staged. If the task was to show a heroic labourer, the guy would be dressed neatly and placed next to a shiny new tractor, not an old and dirty machine he used in his routine everyday work. It was expected from a photographer to demonstrate the ideologically correct image of the Soviet lifestyle. On the contrary these pictures are very artistic and well — very real.
To some these pictures seem absurd are surreal. It is hard to believe they are reflecting the true side of the Soviet state rather than being directed by it.
In the beginning of 1982 the government censorship committee became suspicious of TRIVA activity and the ‘quality’ of such art. They claimed that the artists were deliberately bringing up the wrong, untruthful image of a worker as a member of communist society. As a result – the photographers were pushed to leave the factory and to even partially destroy some of the photo materials accumulated over the years.
