Vuk Vidor • Weird World
(Analogue Photos for a Digital Age)

Photography has always been a part of my life and of my artistic practice. As a way to fix time and create memories, as a source of images or help for my work with paintings, drawings or installations. Before smartphones, carrying a camera suggested a more dedicated approach to photography. You could use it for touristic purposes or as a way to document your life. An artist tends to use it for “artistic” purposes either in pure photographic terms or for their work. I did both by creating images for record covers or my own visual experiments which were conceived to some extent in a “professional” way, and on the other side by using disposable analogue cameras on a daily basis, small instamatics and the first little digital ones that you could carry in your pocket. These were used for memories, odd snapshots of daily life, events, travels etc.

In those days you would give your films to the photo lab and get the photos back in a box. Often some of the pictures had a sticker on them with the label “Non Facturé”, which meant they were considered by the lab as bad, out of focus, badly framed, overexposed or just mistakes, so you didn’t have to pay for them. This collection of images is based initially on those rejected photos which when put together create strange visual sequences of disbalanced moments and details. By setting them in a left-right layout, a dialogue is created between them and possible stories emerge. These images feature known or unknown people, self-portraits, places from all around the world and they create a strange collection of fragmented moments and memories before everybody became a photographer and started documenting and exposing their own lives on the internet. These fragments from an analogue age are the opposite and in clear contrast to the digital filtered artificial imagery that today’s devices provide to everyone. Somehow the analogue mistakes become more real than the digital perfection. And that way we can maybe return to something more artistic.

This conversation will be conducted in English.