False vampires, strangled nightingales and morning awakeners

Galerie U Dobrého pastýře 12 05 — 21 08
opening — 12 05 2021

We are oversaturated with visual perceptions and stimuli. They attack us from around every corner, lure us and pull our gazes, flow into us from an infinite number of screens. We find in them the culprit of the distraction of our attention, the feeling of wasted time and any dissatisfaction in our lives. We get carried away with them on endless escalators of trends that take us nowhere. The logical counter-movement is then stopping the view, slowing down the time, fixing the frame, turning off the zoom. We apply the emergency brake and, despite the interest in the necessary minimum of basic communication or imaging procedures, we get not only the essence of photography or photographic effect, but also the tangibly beautiful, which we are not afraid to relate to (despite all the overcrowding and cynicism). 

Conscious use of the simplest photographic principles (such as shallow depth of field) seems to paradoxically return lost contours to photography. Maybe it's time to bring the term "photogeny" back into play. Give it new contents. For example, touching by sight. Consider darkness and exposure - the two opposites in which each photograph is created. Their bipolarity is a mysterious spell that allows you to enchant even with such a simple technology as the almost invisible hole of the camera obscura.

As if by a miracle, it allows (with the sound of a trigger and a moment of silence) to reproduce the beauty of a frozen flower, to capture the surprised look of an unprepared model in the studio, the hair of a hare or hybrid structures captured in the half-life. The subject, which has been tested a hundred times, twists in front of us and fades like photographic paper in the sun. We enter a space, we photograph by mere observation, the blink of an eye, the exposure of the view, the aperture of eyelashes. Photography is in us. We know what's coming: we chose it from the shutterstock of romantic options.