Sarah Pickering

#8 min Modry Duch, Zdena Kolečková

Photography and the tourist set out almost simultaneously on a journey through history on the threshold of modernity. They walk together and transform each other through mutual interactions. I follow these changes from the perspective of the tourist gaze, asking myself where the tourist’s gaze is directed from and what it is directed at. I search for answers in the story of a single daguerreotype of the Niagara Falls, captured in 1840 by Hugh Lee Pattinson.

#5 min Zdena Kolečková

The culture of the Balkan region, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in particular, has been formed by its unique history and a web of authentic traditions. The art which springs from this environment – including photography – rigorously pays homage to these ancestral roots, although this may not always be obvious at first. Localities such as Tuzla (Bosnia), the birthplace of Emir Šehanović (b. 1981), in fact are among the cradles of European civilization. The cosmogenic notions of the ancient denizens of the region, embodied by deities representing the elements, as well as the structured polytheism of the Illyrians who arrived in the area after them, which combined a cult of agriculture and fertility with the matriarchal features of care and protection, all naturally fused with Graeco-Roman and Celtic religious notions. Subsequently, from the early Middle Ages, there spread across the territory of what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina the activities of the Gnostic sect of the Bogomils, which transformed into what became known within Christianity as the “Bosnian heresy”, whose adherents would later, after the expansion of the Ottoman empire, mostly convert to Islam. Thus the specific line of Bosnian Islam, as well as the rituals of the contemporary Orthodox Church, display echoes of pagan rites. Another specific trait of local color in Bosnia which has been passed down through the female line of succession for centuries is traditional medicine and faith healing, represented by rituals for the protection against evil spells, counteracting evil curses, telling the future, or communication with spirits, which often borders on the magic or the occult. In the 20th century, the influences of Central-European spiritualism also spread across the Balkans (first after the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary, and then after the First World War with the emergence of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia); for instance through the activities of the spiritualist society New Sun, based in Osijek, which at the turn of the 20th century conducted lectures on reincarnation, telepathy, telekinesis, communication with astral beings, and the like.

#5 min Zdena Kolečková

The photographic work of Finnish artist Elina Brotherus is founded on the intertwining of reflection and construction. Her trademark approach is the introduction of personal mythologies and feminine topics into landscape photography. In the second half of the 20th century, when she created her first well-known series of photographs, this was the tried and tested approach used by several other artists for animating their images' content level. The innovative approach that separates extreme and sometimes voyeuristic-masochistic and intentionally aestheticized poetic environmental self-portraits from similar photographic approa­ches is the painterly perception (via the camera) of the photographed motif. This perception grows out of the photographer's sensitive way of working with the constellation of light in the resulting images, giving them their specific atmosphere and acting as a strong unifying element.

#4 min Zdena Kolečková

The origins of Edgar Martins (born 1977) are an important key that significantly shapes the character of his work. His refined sense for perfect composition, order, rhythm and detail, combined with his technical processing of images, stem from his life experience and reflect the pulsating multicultural nature and thousands of years of tradition that are found in the southern Chinese province and former Portuguese colony of Macao, where he lived from early childhood and spent his adolescence. The genius loci of this location contributed towards the artist’s unique talent to creatively evoke an intense experience from a particular process, state, event or time period as well as to his ability to transpose ‘beauty’ even through subject matter that is basically unattractive. 

#6 min Zdena Kolečková

The Dutch artist Edwin Zwakman, a graduate of the Akademie van Beeldende Kunsten Rotterdam (1993) and the Rijksakademie Amsterdam (1997), was born in The Hague in 1969. He is often labeled as the follower of conceptualist photographers such as Cindy Sherman or Jeff Wall. Yet an increasingly marked affinity with Zwakman’s activities can also be traced in the work of the internationally renowned American artist of the older generation, David Levinthal (born 1949), or in that of a Hungarian photographer of the middle generation, Dezsö Szabó (born 1967). They also capture artificially created environmental structures, yet operate on an altogether different thematic level. In his photograpic cycles Mein Kampf or Hitler Moves East, Levinthal reactivates collective historical memory of the Euro-Atlantic civilization; the photographs in the series Baseball or Desire are a commentary on the opulent excess of this civilization. Szabó reconstructs and visualizes in his art projects Black Box, Tornado and Expedition the catastrophic scenarios of massmedia agencies. An element common to the work of the aforementioned artists share is their easy sense of the interchangeability of fiction and reality. In their attitude we may observe a creative approach which is present at all stages of the perception and transformation of reality into a technical image. As in their photographs, however, we could find the very same element – that of the artificial construct – anywhere in the country that Edwin Zwakman comes from.

#4 min Zdena Kolečková

After about fifteen years of the unconditional dominance of the photographic image as the main vehicle of visual information in the age of the Internet, it has now partly retreated from this exclusive position. The still images which in the past two decades inundated the dynamically evolving web have gradually been replaced by an even more accessible form of visual information: the moving image. Animation and various forms of video-sequencing have lately become a fixture of news servers, web pages and above all social networks.

#3 min Zdena Kolečková

One of the youngest, though chronically busy and hectically working representatives of the Swiss-French photo scene is Maxime Guyon. He, just like many other artists featured in this issue of the Fotograf magazine, creates his own “artificial” worlds based on a fresh reflection of what our times offer us in terms of visual culture. In his work our ongoing, or very recent, day-to-day reality is re-defined in the form of carefully constructed contrasts, by means of techniques popular with the inter-war avant-garde (among others). The subjects of his photographs are in many cases sculpted by the artist himself: he collects the necessary items and materials and then builds things in the studio – by moulding, cutting, sawing, gluing, painting or wallpapering – until he is happy with the look of the still-life he has created. After the shoot he manipulates the images on a computer through postproduction.

#2 min Zdena Kolečková

Silvie Kolevová (*1979) is a noted personality among the younger generation of Czech photographers, for whom moments of global reach and multiculturalism are typical as are a parallel search for local identity and relations to one‘s own roots. A natural bipolarity in their behaviour does not represent an aimless andering on the surface. In the case of this artist it is without a doubt an expression of searching for the meaning of human existence, an interconnection to the actions, ties and feelings of our forefathers and the hope invested into generations of their own descendents.