Allan Parker
University of Westminster, London
PHOTOGRAPHY AND ITS MEDIUMS
This paper will present some remarks on the ‘medium specific’ aspects of photography in relation to its communities of users. Today we experience widespread media convergence and consequently more pluralistic ideas of the presence and use of the photographic, particularly in relation to contemporary art.
After a brief account of medium specificity in the arts, beginning with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1730 work; “Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, through to the mid-20thC modernist insistence on the purity of the medium, this text will examine recent exhibitions such as ‘Material Light’ held at the Cultural Centre in Belgrade in 2015 and at the Kochi Biennale in India earlier this year, which highlight the material and textual potential of photography.
The notion of ‘contemporary photography’ as against ‘the use of the photographic in contemporary art’ has created something like a fault line between these two milieus. Many photography courses and degrees seem to have held onto many of the medium specific ideas established in the last century in America and Europe, while art media courses have perhaps been more open about the various uses and potential of photographs and the presence of the photographic in their output.
The digital turn has made many rethink their relationship to the camera, given near infallibility of image-making with such devices, which for many can be as creatively restrictive as it is liberating.
Allan F. Parker is a Senior lecturer on the MA and BA Photography courses at the University of Westminster in London. He is also a visiting artist at Srishti College in Bangalore, India. He has created a wide range of photographic work in a variety of situations; his portraits have been shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK.
Sonja Jankov
Independent curator, Belgrade
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS:
PHOTOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO BRUTALISM
This paper analyses relations of photography and Brutalism, a revalorised period in architectural history which came into focus in the past decade due to its rapid destruction, especially in Europe. After short presentation of the origins of the term and its relation to Soviet modernism and functionalism, the paper further analyses how photography and Brutalism correlated, from documentation of the first conceptual sketches of buildings, over documentation of construction processes, to the presentation of demolished sites or collections in museums. The paper presents several thematic research projects and exhibitions related to heritage of Brutalism which include photographic series (Béton, Kunsthalle Wien, 2016; Seaside Architecture and Urbanism in Bulgaria and Croatia, Vienna and Rijeka, 2013; Enchanting Views: Romanian Black Sea Tourism Planning and Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, Bucharest 2015), as well as artistic projects that connect photography to Brutalism (Pablo Iglesias Maurer, NikoletaMarković, Stefan und Bernhard Marte, Wolf Vostell, Laurent Kronental, Duška Boban, Norikata Minami), in contrasting comparison to significance of Brutalism in popular movies which feature it.
Sonja Jankov is an independent curator, with state exam defended in 2015. She focuses on contemporary art and modernist architecture. Her practice often employs artistic methods as demonstrated in Interpretations of Architecture, while her projects include SPENS and Socialist Sport Halls Today, Post-Archive of Contemporary Art and GIF: Visual Practice as Critique. She worked in Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (2012-2015) and was an art director of Institute for Culture of Vojvodina. Sonja Jankov authored the monograph Chrono-Spectres of Danilo Vuksanović: Calligraphy, Portraits, Landscapes (2014). She wrote several papers in academic journals in Serbia and abroad, texts for exhibition catalogues and numerous art critiques. In 2016, she was part of the project Future Architecture Platform, coordinated by Museum of Architecture in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Slobodan Jovanović
Museum of Applied Arts, Belgrade
URBAN PALIMPSEST OF NINA TODOROVIĆ
The exhibition Mapping of Deconstruction held at the Museum of Applied Art in Belgrade is the continuation of the photographic research that Nine Todorović presented in her project Architecture of Memory. Her current artistic activities can be located somewhere between the documenting of the remains of the psychotic psychogeography of a particular place and the recording of changes in the city palimpsests through which she walks - the city as a parchment containing the old text that will soon be replaced with the new one. It is the very moment of change, created after the demolition of a building structure, and before deletion and new urban writing, that Nina Todorović records. In the cycle of photographs starting the project Architecture of Memory, she recorded the imprints that the demolished houses’ gables left on the neighbouring buildings. As in her latest photographs, displayed at the exhibition Mapping of Deconstruction, at the moment the work was created, there existed the marks of a neighbouring house, which were, in the meantime, painted over or replaced with newly constructed buildings. Only a photograph remained as a document of this imprint. The loss of memory implies the loss of a part of an individual personality. The loss of the memory of a facility implies the loss of the memory of the events that happened in this facility, and of the people who lived there. These imprints represent the last physical evidence of the existence of buildings and people living in them.
Slobodan Jovanović – art historian, art critic and senior curator at Belgrade Museum of Applied Art, Department for Contemporary Applied Art. Chairman of the Council of the Salon of Museum of Applied Art.Curator of the museum exhibitions such as Mapping of Deconstruction by Nina Todorović (2017), Books of Prints (2014, retrospective exhibition of Jugoslav Vlahović), škart: halftime (2012, retrospective exhibition of the “škart“ Group), The Museum of Childhood by Vladimir Perić (2009), Autobiografic – retrospective exhibition of Dušan Petričić (2008, ICOM Award for the Project of the Year in Republic of Serbia), Illustrators of Politikin Zabavnik (2007, SSOAHAward for the Best Exhibition in Republic of Serbia). Art critic for journal Beogradski književni časopis. Member of ICOM and AICA.
Dijana Metlić
Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad
STANLEY KUBRICK:
FROM PHOTOGRAPHY TO FILM
I will discuss connections between Stanley Kubrick’s early photographic practice and his later film oeuvre. Kubrick started his career as a staff photographer in the influential American magazine Look where he was assigned to make numerous photographs and photo-essays from 1945 to 1950. Until recently, his photography was unknown to the wide audience and film scholars, because Look ceased publication with its issue of 19 October 1971, and the collection of its photographs was donated to the Library of Congress, Washington (five million items). In 1998 Rainer Crone began an intensive search for Kubrick’s lost photographs and his project was encouraged by Kubrick himself, although the director had no material to contribute, neither negatives nor prints, from his time on the Look staff. In the last two decades, after Kubrick’s death, a new, inspiring analysis of his photography was provided by Philippe D. Mather who explored the influences of photojournalism on Kubrick’s photography and his understanding of film art. Following Crone’s recommended classification and the results of Mather’s enlightening study, in this paper I will focus on the particular photographs and photo-essays, clearly indicating the appearance of distinctive elements of Kubrick’s aesthetics in photography, which developed in the forthcoming decades in his films, such as: symmetrical framing (applied to suggest ease and balance, or to induce the opposite feeling of entrapment); low or high camera angles (provoking a sense of estrangement); unique use of light and shade (developed under the influence of his childhood hero, photographer Weegee), and framing an image in depth. Although today Kubrick is acknowledged as one of the most important film auteur, he never denied the importance of his formative years as a photographer in Look, pointing out that photography certainly gave him the first step up to movies.
Dijana Metlić is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad.
In 2012 she completed her PhD in History of Art and Film Studies at the Department of History of Art, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade.
She has written two books: Stanley Kubrick: Between Painting and Film (Film Centre Serbia, 2013) and The Images of Ephemeral World: Connections Between French and Serbian Intimism (Gallery of Matica srpska, 2017). She has published numerous articles on fine arts, photography and film, and participated in many National and International conferences.
Her primary area of research is Modern Art, with a particular focus on the interrelations between film and the visual arts.
Marina Paulenka
Organ Vida — International Photography Festival
ORGAN VIDA — a Decade of Contemporary Photography in the SEE Europe
The photography association Organ Vida is the leading platform for photography in Croatia. The association focuses on continuously promoting contemporary Croatian and international photography practices. By organizing diverse annual activities, projects and programs, the association educates and encourages critical thinking about the art of photography. The association functions through the format of the festival, then through an online magazine which brings news and essays from Croatian and international photography scenes, and through the newly established Marina Viculin Award. The artistic director Marina Paulenka will reflect on last 9 years of the festival and speak about curatorship, themes that are in festival focus, how they select and work with artists and how this festival became one of the most interesting in Europe.
Marina Paulenka is a photographer, a founder and artistic director of the Croatian festival Organ Vida—International Photography Festival, Zagreb and the Organ Vida Photography Association, the leading institution for contemporary photography in Croatia. Organ Vida Festival promotes the work of international contemporary artists, both emerging and well-known ones and reflects upon the medium of photography in a wider social context.
Marina Paulenka has an MA in Photography at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb (Croatia) and an MA in Graphic Design at the Faculty of Graphic Arts Zagreb (Croatia). She is an international juror, curator, educator and tutor in many educational projects, and workshops as well as an portfolio reviewer at many institutions, awards, festivals and galleries such as Rencontres d’ Arles, Photomuseum Wintertour, Guernsey Photography Festival, Robert Capa Prize, New East Photography Prize, Fotobook festival Kassel, Maribor Photobook Award, Format Festival, Eyes On, Self Publish Riga, Art Weekend Aarhus, MedPhoto.
Dubravka Lazić
Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad
DEVELOPMENT OF PHOTOGRAPHY: EDUCATION AND ART
Photography has proven to be the most versatile medium concerning its short history and disparity between photography and other fine arts. Photographic medium is constantly evolving and, as such, attained its rightful position in the contemporary history and in the higher education systems worldwide. So far, the World Biennial of Students’ Photography has shown that this evolution is constant and extremely fast. On one hand, photography stays connected to its roots, and on the other, it embraces new influences (technological, historical and social) and assimilates them. Besides analysing above mentioned phenomenon, this article offers an overview of the development of both photographic education and the art of photography: from its early days in the mid-nineteenth century (with no official educational system nor the artistic scene that acknowledged photography as an artistic medium), following the beginning of the twentieth century (and the development of the authority of photography tailed by the first institutionalised schools that assimilated this media), to the late twentieth century and contemporary age (in which photography is an integral part of the higher education curriculums worldwide). Aside from this, diversity of photographic art becomes an important factor that affects mentioned curriculums and its need to keep updated with the development of the contemporary artistic expression. Those diversities and updates are clearly noticeable in the World Biennial of Students’ Photography project and among the works of awarded young photographers who represent the inklings of the future art scene.
Dubravka Lazić – educated as a painter (bachelor studies, 1997), the photographer (master studies, 2000) and film theorist (PhD studies, 2013). She teaches History of Photography, History of Film and Photography at the Academy of Arts and Philosophical Faculty in Novi Sad. She also exhibits her own artwork in Serbia and abroad since 1998.
Dubravka Lazić authored numerous solo exhibitions and participated in many group exhibitions worldwide. She is the author of a number of articles and two books. Also, she is organizer and member of several committees of the University of Novi Sad, organizational boards and juries, as well as the consultant and participant on many artistic projects.
She is currently a Vice-Dean of Arts and International Collaboration at the Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad. She holds the position of the Chairman of the University of Novi Sad, Council of Arts and Humanities.
Jelena Vladušić
Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad
SEEKING HOME
The topic of the project Seeking home is the great refugee wave that swept over the borders of Europe, growing from the initial barely noticeable overflowing of one world into the other into a new migration of people which is acquiring an increasingly dramatic form. Through the use of different media (photography, video and artefacts), the exhibition Seeking home has a goal of enabling a
direct view of individuals which I found on the border crossings so that they are presented individually and not as the media presents them - as a mass, a group, in the gray zone of the asylum-seeking process or just as a number in the statistical reports. With this project the portrayed are taken out of the broadly named group ʹimmigrantsʹ, ʹrefugeesʹ and they gain the status of individual subjects. In my work I take a clear anti-reporting stance, without intending for the content of the work to result in short-lived emotions that disappear as soon as a page of the newspaper is turned or a new tab is opened in an internet browser. This attitude is reflected in the critical and deconstructivist relation towards media accounts and representation of refugee destinies. The subjects in these photographs consciously approach the act of photographing, facing the camera and returning the gaze to the onlooker.
In this work I deal with questions of exile and relocation, the question of otherness of individuals who are in search for their legal and political identity, but also directly with the question of representation, striking a pose, or posing for the photograph.
I use photography as a research tool to explore various psychological, social and political spaces. Documentary approach can result in both direct and abstract interpretations.
Jelena Vladušić́ obtained her BFA and MFA degree from the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad at the department of Photography. She finished her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Arts, at the department for Polymedia Arts. Since 2010 she has been working as a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Technical Scientist at the department for Graphic Engineering and Design and Studies of scene design. She presented her work at five solo exhibitions and took part in a number of group exhibitions both in the country and abroad. Among awards that she received for her work is the award on the Biennale of Youth Artist from Europe and Mediterranean (BJCEM).
Miha Colner
International Centre of Graphic Arts, Slovenia
NOW AND THEN:
THE GREAT WAR REFLECTED IN CONTEMPORARY ART
In his essay entitled Now and Then Miha Colner discusses the role of art in the preserving of memory, observing too the circularity of history. Contemporary artists of the 20th and 21st century commonly did/do not have the need to address the First World War from the point of view of official historical discourses and overviews; they are aware that individual perception of a certain event is usually different from official collective discourses and therefore they often focus instead on intimate stories and marginal events to which they can relate on a more personal level. The essay thus raises a number of relevant questions: How do we see World War I through art making one hundred years later? What do we think and how do we feel about the conflict today, given its immense and catastrophic impact upon the world, then and now? How do contemporary artist approach the war, now that it is at a remove (of one hundred years), to which none can directly relate?
Miha Colner (1978) is an art historian who works as a curator and programme coordinator at the International Centre of Graphic Arts / Svicarija Creative Centre in Ljubljana. He is also active as a publicist, specialised in photography, printmaking, artists’ moving image and various forms of (new) media art. In the period 2006–2016 he was a curator at Photon – Centre for Contemporary Photography, Ljubljana. Since 2005 he has been a contributor of newspapers, magazines, specialist publications, and his personal blog, as well as part-time lecturer. He lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
István Virágvölgyi
Robert Capa Photography Grand Prize, Hungary
EVERY PAST IS MY PAST – EXAMPLES FROM THE 100K IMAGES IN THE FORTEPAN DIGITAL ARCHIVE
A unique digital platform called Fortepan was created in 2009 where you can access high resolution images taken before 1990 freely. The archive based mostly on volunteer work makes our common visual memory available to everyone without restriction that is a very important asset in creating a more democratic society. The almost 100K images were either found thrown out into the rubbish or were donated mainly by families but also professional photographers. There is a community around Fortepan who are working on solving the mysteries surrounding the metadata linked to the images like the place and date of creation and whatever else can be found out of the content pictured.
István Virágvölgyi studied freehand drawing, desktop publishing and photography and earned a master’s degree from library and information studies at Eötvös Loránd University. He worked at Origo news portal first as a photo editor and then as head of photography between 2007 and 2011 after which he joined MTI Hungarian News Agency and was the head of the photo desk until 2014. He served as deputy director for professional affairs at the Robert Capa Contemporary Photography Centre until the end of 2015. He is the secretary of the Robert Capa Photography Grand Prize Hungary.
David Pujadó
Photographer, gallery owner, curator, director of Belgrade Photo Month
BELGRADE PHOTO MONTH – ANNUAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL
Since 2013 he has been based in Belgrade where he runs Бартcелона, a photography gallery that has showcased more than 40 exhibitions. In 2015 he set up Belgrade Photo Month, an annual festival dedicated to exhibiting and promoting photography in Belgrade. The second edition of the BPM took place last April.