John Peter Askew, Woman Peeking Out 2017
with an essay by Elena Zaytseva
A woman at a window is one of the much-loved motifs in art that encourage easy engagement between the viewer and the model. The frame of the window, the light of the sky, being reflected and dying in the depths of the room, brings the focus onto the woman’s face, while she is looking back at us. Many artists loved this motif, such as those in the Dutch Golden Age of painting, and used it to render joy, conviviality and prosperity. But looking at this photograph by John Peter Askew I can’t help but recall a work by the Russian artist Nilolay Yaroshenko, Life is Everythere (1888), from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow — a rather darker image of prisoners at a train window, one of them a young woman with delicate pale face, holding a small child. They are feeding pigeons with bread crumbs and looking calm, despite the circumstances of being transported to the prison camps of Siberia. Maybe it’s a stretch, but I can’t help thinking that these two images are related.
Nikolay Yaroshenko, Life is Everythere (1888); Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
The woman in Askew’s photograph is in her eighties. She has a broad face with high cheekbones: her eyes are serious but kind. The window is barely opened, leaving a narrow gap through which she is peering at us as if she is reluctant to talk, holding one hand on a knob as if she is closing the window right now. As the majority of my life has been lived in Russia, this woman looks very familiar.
I knew so many women with similar broad, careworn faces, their eyes hiding sadness in their depths even in those moments when they smile. These women were born in the 1930s and survived the Great Patriotic War, most of them either children of soldiers killed in the war or children of ‘enemies of the people’ who perished in Stalin’s purges in numbers similar to the war dead. If you drive about a hundred miles north from the small town near Perm where Askew shot this photo, you come to Solikamsk, where the biggest foster home for children of ‘enemies of people’ in the Soviet Union was located.
Maybe, this woman avoided bad luck and grew up in a proper family, and we know for sure that she has a family of her own — the silhouette of a man reflected in the window is that of her grandson. But she looks like one of the Russian women of her generation whose life typically was tough. Many of them were single mothers, while even those who had families were carrying a double burden of full-time work — assigned to Soviet citizens by law, when non-working women could receive a criminal charge of ‘tuneyadstvo’ (‘doing nothing’) and sent to a prison — and a full-time shift of domestic labour and child-rearing after work. They rarely received any help from their partners, and were often victims of domestic violence when their husbands indulged their frustrations with life in alcohol.
And yet they were loving women with incredible vitality — they were loved and they share many touching stories of selfless friendships. And they were able to look beautiful. The way they expressed their love was in hard work. They were constantly doing something, never staying still: cooking delicious and healthy meals for their loved ones, cleaning for them, sewing, washing and ironing their clothes. They didn’t scrape by hardships, they made life around them beautiful. In their gardens they passionately grew flowers alongside fruits and vegetables; they peroxided their hair and wore high heels on the unpaved streets of the small towns they lived. In Askew’s photograph the flowers in the windowsill look lush, and apparently very well looked after.
The woman in the photograph actually looks very similar to my great-aunt who, although she had lost her parents and brothers in ordeals of Stalinism in the 1930s, had lived a content and full life in Moscow with her Red Army officer husband and their daughter. She was well protected and much loved by her husband. I saw her a lot near the end of her life. And even she, one of the luckiest of her generation of Russian women, always repeated the same mantra that I heard so often while growing up in Russia: that love indeed is nothing more than hard work.
Elena Zaytseva
Elena Zaytseva is the curator of Pushkin House’s exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.