Tonight, 29th March 2018 at 19h, in UK Parobrod 2 exhibitions – New Talents 2018 and Instagram 2018. Come, you will have the opportunity to see and enjoy these projects.
For 18 years, we have been living in the 21st century. Many things have happened, many things have changed and photography, perhaps, more than any other media, has changed considerably. It has certainly lost its aura of particularity by the mere fact that it is omnipresent. It became important as a word as well, though not as precise as the word itself. Hence we frequently view it in alliance with a text that will explain it, expand or deepen its meaning. In the contemporary practice of visual arts education, text and theory are an inseparable part of practical work. That was also proved by the work of participants in the third “New Talents” competition, most of whom are students of photography. Although each of the photo series represents a narrative, their full meaning and their direction become discernible only by the combination of the image and text. And that is no longer news. However, the way the stories are created still is. They vary from a directed situation, changing of the very form of photography into a 3D object, to fiction, combination of archival material and personal, and ultimately to “classic” reporting. The desire to tell stories has not diminshed compared to 20, 50 or 100 years ago. Inexhaustable human curiosity and the need for fiction compel us to pursue stories, to record them and share them. Yet, their linear narrative was replaced by the intuitive flow in which places, time, actors and subjective impression are all intermingled with the factual one. A dominant atmosphere is not so much due to the artistic component, as it is due to the dramatic effect that is helping us to knit a story into a ball of visual information. Perhaps the medium of photography has become more easy and accessible than ever before, yet the communication between spectators and photography was, and has remained, a field of knowledge in which a story-maker and its spectator participate equally, weaving into it their own experience, sensibility, culture, religious and political attitudes, or simply their own age.
Ivana Tomanović