by Krystina Stimakovits
A camera around my neck renders me immediately alert and meticulously attentive to my physical surroundings. The myriad inter-relationships between forms, materials, space and light become an endless source of intrigue and fascination. Certain arrangements of objects or materials seem to attract my eye and I feel compelled to move in closer.
Other portfolios contain close-up work of glass surfaces and fencing, the selection presented here hones in on materials that struck me with their varying textures, tactility and a language of form that eludes straight forward analytical categorisation or interpretation.
The act of photographing what presents itself before me is a form of recognition and acknowledgement of the wondrously familiar and yet strange world I live in. As the photograph comes into being, following a considered and some times drawn out dialogue, photography also becomes a way of ‘amplifying’ (to use Meyerowitz’s notion) what had originally been ‘there’. Partaking and observing how a fragment of three dimensional reality stripped from its context metamorphoses into a two-dimensional object that is a photograph strikes me as an extraordinary privilege.
Photographs are so misleading. They have about them this aura of being an objective document of something ‘captured’ at a particular moment and in a particular place, and yet they remain essentially ambiguous and slippery in meaning. Show any photograph to a group of people and they will elicit different associations, interpretations and emotional responses in each one of them.
To me a successful photograph is one that works with and not against this inherent ambiguity; one which invites us to return to it again and again, to ask questions, to reflect on its peculiar attraction and possible meanings. I try my best to do this great medium justice by creating photographs that make us look closer not only at the world around us but also into ourselves; to ponder over the associations, the particular memories and emotions that with little means they have so manifestly been able to evoke.
On the theme of CLOSER, Spring 2013