TO LIVE
Milena Zlatar

'I photograph what I do not wish to paint and I paint what I cannot photograph.'
Man Ray

'Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow.'
Susan Sontag

Photography is an art genre (or medium) that unveils life, in the broadest meaning of the term, and gives insight into au understanding of life. It is a multi-layered understanding, and an insight through a medium that brings us close to the truth; at the same time, however, it manipulates us. Aesthetics intermingles with ethics, and the viewer plays a more active role than he or she is aware of. Photography not only reflects reality, but also reveals what is invisible at first glance: it evaluates reality anew, and also changes reality through the comprehension of the viewer. The time in which we live is bound to images, and these images define us. Photographs are images of visible conditions; they are evidence of events, of captured, fleeting moments and they carry with them insights into life and the world. Photography flirts with both painting and film; these two media have offered photography its foundation elements: colours, values, composition, sequence, dynamics, and so on. It has been said that moving images (represented by film) stand for life, while transience is a captured moment – i.e., a photograph. To look at photographs means to look into the eyes of transience. And transience has always attracted human beings, since it is the awareness of our transitoriness that enhances the value of life. Brief instants reveal our common human character: people are born, they love each other, and they laugh, mourn, hope, work, create … and die. The circle closes. Things and environment (including flora and fauna) constitute a part of people; they are the work of his or her hands, the surrounding that he or she has marked (and vice versa). All this can best be seen in moments captured by photography. We just have to learn how to read it. A photograph can train us in intensive viewing, which reminds us of the ethos of poetry rather than painting (according to Moholy-Nagy). Precisely poetry is the surplus that touches our emotions the most, and photography also has this power. Playing with the thought that photography could make time stand still, reproduce the world, and transfer individual situations into some other space and time, is but one side of the truth; the same goes for the belief in its magical power.

A photographer is an anthropologist led by intuition, and together with him or her we are often able to perceive other worlds and unknown lives. Photography has brought unfamiliar worlds close to us, it has spanned physical distances. Its role in preserving memories of events and images of people has gradually changed from recording reality to its evaluation and comprehension. Here we speak of the photographic vision that has become omnipresent. The reading of images has become an intimate matter for every individual, as well as a collective obsession. But the engagement of mass emotion hides numerous traps: as much as suffering and horrible scenes can induce our feelings of pity and arouse the awareness of powerlessness and the urge to help, for example, in the next moment – when we turn our look away from the shocking scene – we can become quite indifferent. How could that be? Did the previously horrible subject suddenly become acceptable, did our moral judgements change and we become less sensitive to the seen? Have our feelings numbed, have we become less responsive?

'In these last decades, "concerned" photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it,' wrote Susan Sontag, one of the most perceptive researchers of the photographic medium. Today it is television that undoubtedly plays the leading role in the transmission of shocking images, while photography – fortunately – has taken its place alongside other art practices that have retained their moral and ethical criteria. Photography has proved that it can do more than merely record events. Its superiority lies in the unspeakable visual form; its syntax differs from the syntax of painting, but is equivalent to it. It enables a specific insight into reality: in its characteristic manner it uncovers social, psychological, or material worlds. In what way could the events taking place in the contemporary world be authentically represented, and in what way could the curtain veiling the conditions of life be lifted – at least partially – if not through the optics of art? And when speaking about the visual arts, what genre could be more appropriate for this task than photography?

The fine art exhibition, entitled simply To Live, is meant to encompass the widest possible meanings and existential dilemmas of our existence and being, and to raise questions such as: Can we survive in a world shaken by conflicts and clashes, all kinds of impatience, and apparently unsolvable ecological problems? How to preserve life and human character, so that we can live our lives and go through all the little daily stories that make our lives meaningful? It was not our aim to underline sentimental humanism, or to portray the world in the sense of a dark scenario trapped in the alienated, rude and discouraging machinery of a globalised world. The theme is meant to be as broad as possible – the invited artists of different generations succeeded in their photographs to point to the social, ecological, economic and humanitarian dilemmas of man as an individual and a social being whose basic right is to live. The artists have looked into the problems of war and human aggression, but also into ordinary topics, and they sought to grasp human motives unfolding in extreme as well as everyday situations. They have opened the issues of the ethical role of artists and art, be it by means of shocking or even by ordinary images. These photographs have shown us a cognitive world revealing itself in the awareness of memento mori as much as in the sense of To Live. The world shown in photography, which is straightforward and deceptive at the same time, is different; our gaze is more profound. We reveal the surreal, and we also perceive the ethical in the work of art. The claim that every work of art is inclined to ethics has been confirmed regardless of the possible modifications of the ethical or moral codexes through the passing of time and changes of space, i.e., within every given social reality. We only have to preserve the sensitivity and the ability to discern the ethical. Science, morality and art, and also the intellectual, ethical and political purposes of creation, are intertwined more than we would dare to believe. The exclusivity and competence of photography (even in relation to sociological standpoints and economic systems) shows itself in the nature of the medium; more than any other genre, it unites all different dimensions of creation and combines them with documentation, which is simply a view of life itself.

In the present exhibition we scroll through the whole world; nevertheless, the selected artists point primarily to the European point of view, since the bulk of the artists grew up in the Western European art tradition. The view from this cultural position is utterly logical (on the part of the exhibition organisers); in the opposite case, we would have had to entrust the selection of artists much more to connoisseurs of non-Western cultures. In this context, however, the exhibition has been merely 'seasoned' with new energies sourcing from China, South America and Africa. And we have also hinted at the features that will hardly be missing in any authentic art of the future: the expressiveness of cultural minorities, feminist standpoints, new (and newly established) religions and mythologies, and so forth. All these dilemmas and attempts point to the ways of art in the era of globalism, when the succession of grand art styles and the dominance of Western culture have faded. Photography has been the first medium to encompass all these styles, assuming the primacy of the 'classical' artefact. Just when it seemed that art has reached its end in visual expression, it has made its grand comeback precisely with photography – with its possibility of mechanical (or, nowadays, digital) reproduction and a specific structure of time that can only be realised in photography.

The artistic poetics of the exhibition point to the recognition of a simple formula of life that can be discovered and grasped by looking. The meaning of the expression 'to lay eyes on' is also 'to fall in love with'. And it is the emotion of 'love' that makes us human. Images – that is, ourselves and our gaze (as we see, as we want to be seen, and as we are seen by others). Images – that is, our life between physical and emotional existence. This is why images have such an influence on us and mark us so profoundly. In this exhibition we have aimed to use superior poetics in order to expose the positive thinking and ethics that point – in the framework of topical existential dilemmas – to an optimistic view of the world and the belief in man. It is only with the onset of the 21^st century that Europe has been nearing a catharsis after the clashes and turmoil experienced throughout the past century. The territory that has been the cradle of Western culture went through the most dramatic events during the World Wars, with concentration camps as the lowest possible level of dehumanisation in history. And the final decade of the century saw the drama in the Balkans; the current generations of Bosnians will carry these frightful memories with them throughout their lives. Alas, the beginning of the new century has brought innocent victims falling into humiliating despair once again, and Western society is unable to reconcile the angry spirits let out of the bottle in the centuries of colonialisation and dominance over those who are different. These latter have been left in poverty, without education and appreciation, and they have become helpless even in the face of their own dictators, all kinds of fanatics and provokers of inter-ethnic conflicts. These things seem to be unsolvable. Nevertheless, some sparkles of hope can be perceived in these artists' views of life. Life is beautiful, even if only for moments …