Constructed Photographs (Vasja Nagy) We have become almost completely accustomed to photography because of its omnipresence.

I say almost, because we come across, create, store and observe photographic images virtually every day, but even a good 170 years after the photographic process was patented, it is still not quite clear what photography is, what its photographic quality is, and what makes the photographic image significantly different from other image-making techniques. In trying to understand the automatic recording of light, we must first think away the camera obscura, which is predominantly an instrument of the rational, distanced observer of the world. This device was adopted by painting for its needs of constructing images with its own thinking, which it also went on to develop further according to its own needs. The more the photograph is attached to the image from the camera obscura, the more its thinking stems from the painterly. The most unfortunate within that is the connection of the photograph with the stopping of time and the representation of reality. It is important to be constantly aware that the photographic image, together with its support, is the only reality and the only presence, which is received by its recipient. Everything else can most aptly be compared to the impression the listener is left with by the narrator, and is sooner a linguistic aspect of photography than its essential feature. Just like any other image, the photograph partakes in communication in which it cannot lie. In order to lie, we need language. Although the deliberate creation of a scene for the camera is as old as photography itself, the term constructed photography appeared in as late as the 1970s. It denoted the photographic approach that omitted to follow the concept of documentary photography and lead to understanding reality within the medium. On the other hand, a different approach of constructing the photographic image can be traced all the way to the 1850s, called photomontage. By intertwining photographic concepts with collage, the latter builds a special rapport towards reality itself. The exhibition of works by five artists in the Galerie Schleifmhlgasse 12-14 is based on the theoretical discourse of concepts of presence, photographic reality and objecthood. Between the two modes of understanding constructed photographs, the selected artworks stem from the procedures of photomontage, since the questions on reality are here dealt with more thoroughly and in a more complex manner than in the other. Photomontage came to life as an artistic approach as far back as in the Victorian era with Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson, although its first golden age occurred with the historical avant-gardes, especially with the Dadaists in the West and the Constructivists in the East. From the mid 1950s at least Richard Hamilton and Jerry Uelsman should be mentioned at this point, but it really began to live again in the work of artists that art historians labelled as the neo-avant-garde. And finally, we can note how this most recent decade has put forward a number of photographers from around the world that are giving new meaning to this technique. To some these are hybrid identities and worlds, to others kaleidoscopic visions, to others still utopian ideas or apocalyptic fears, that which drives them to the construction of such images and strengthens the spirit of the new generation of photomontage. Transforming the scene Katinka Theis uses a documentary approach in photographing places, but subsequently adds visual elements to her images which she has not met there. She incorporates them into the internal space of the image as if they were originally part of it. In such a way the photographic image preserves the appearance of a documentary shot, which she puts into series and labels with the name of the place that she has genuinely visited, in this case Reykjavik. To viewers her photographs appear as scenes from reality since the added elements do not seem

impossible. On the one hand, they are reminiscent of scenes that can be observed in the contemporary urban space or are influenced by visual records of the feats of contemporary architecture, the viewer is at least open to the possibility that the scene was actually shot as it appears in the photo. Transforming the object Giovanna Torresin photographs hearts, pig hearts, which have a strong resemblance to human ones. She does not actually photograph them herself, but gets a professional photographer to shoot them according to her instructions. The artist then uses the images as reproduction material, manipulating them on the computer. She implicates them into new relationships with other objects, changes them almost beyond recognition, or covers them with textures, creating an altogether different objecthood. These procedures are largely reminiscent of the production of advertising photography, especially in fashion and cosmetics. She builds up images using colour reduction in three basic archetypal colours white, red and black. She places the hearts before a black ground and by so doing assigns them the mystical power of the sacred. Nonetheless they remain as apparitions since they are tightly bound to the photographic image. They do not posses a corporeality beyond the support, therefore they can not be relics. Hypertrophy gives them a surreal feel, which renders them iconic. Generating the photographic object Tilen bona photographs objects of prestige, luxury cars, which have been damaged in accidents and restored for resale in car workshops. To the ordinary eye, to the eye of someone who is not familiar with car repairs therefore, the car details in themselves are fascinating in terms of design. Yet they appear as parts of a prestigious product because of their structural and material production, seeming even more unknown, foreign, remote and inaccessible. In his images, which are compiled from original shots, the artist bestows upon them a mightiness as well. He prints his images in large formats, which sometimes resemble the inside of a spacecraft, and then again a mechanical monster, etc. They awaken the feeling of the superior and the remote in the viewer, and are bound by a sort of fine thread of the sublime. Deus ex machina looks out of them and this is when they become real totems of the god of the machine. Transforming identity Anna Watzinger uses photography to explore her own identity on the basis of the relationships that she perceives in her life. In one work she uses photographs of her own face and the faces of people who are close to her. She layers them one over the other, using transparency to allow them to shine through to the surface. In such a way a mix of different features is produced and the layers cause the eye some instability in focusing, yet in the end it functions consistently enough for the viewer to perceive the image as one face. This acts as a symbol and representation of the relationships between the artist and the persons that have been photographed. It is a psychological and physiological graph that shows the clearest picture where elements come together in their similarities. In the other work, the artist sets up a confrontation between the three stages of life. Beside the photograph of her face as a child, which in this case symbolizes the past, she has placed a recent self-portrait, which shows her as a mature woman and which belongs to the present. The third image is constructed so that it shows the artists features, but the face is that of an elderly person. Generating two-dimensional objects Roy LaGrone goes for walks in his surroundings and occasionally picks up discarded objects and puts them in his pocket. Sometimes he also collects the views of the outskirts of

civilization in his photographic box. In doing that, he does not make any conceptual difference between nature and the traces of man, in one case or the other. Both are reflected in the inseparable intertwining of the two. At home he scans or photographs the discarded objects, such as a plastic bottle top or an acorns cupule, importing and integrating the views that he has shot outdoors into them. What occurs is an unusual object, a container with its inner micro cosmos, in which it seems all the rules of Euclidean space prevail. In the same way these rules appear to work within the photographic image, since the object casts a shadow on the neutral background, which makes it seem real. A shadow ultimately confirms the existence of a body after all. Yet this body resides only in two dimensions and thus a tension in relation to the viewers body is established. Especially, since in its flat reality the object feels good to such an extent, that we can go as far as to describe it as two-dimensional sculpture.

Translated from the Slovene: Arven akti Kralj Szomi