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#5 Borders of Documentary

In the third year of the existence of Fotograf Magazine we decided to tackle the delicate subject of the “documentary” as our contribution to the as yet non-existent debate regarding the “direction of contemporary documentary photography”. However, while the classical figures of documentary photography mainly focused on traditional humanist themes, documenting unguarded moments in street scenes, moving or funny, or imaginatively photographed human relations, it seems as though today this area has suddenly become empty, or rather, it seems that all has already been done and further repetitions merely trivialize the genre.

For more than a decade there have been efforts in contemporary photography to use the documentary method to express a personal concept, to play with it within the framework of staged documentary, or on the other hand, to renounce the elements of compositional or situational aesthetics, renouncing what is now almost pejoratively called artistic photography, instead to pursue personal record, a sort of visual diary, featuring photographs which deliberately depart from aesthetic criteria. It seems that in the last decade, much has changed also in the understanding of the medium of photography as such.  

#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Karol Radziszewski

Radziszewski’s art, in its multidisciplinary medley, is driven in its roots by a longing to carve out a space of diversity and queer beauty out of misery. Be it the secret queer meeting spots in communist Poland or the place for alternative narratives on history, it is constantly craving for a less miserable world…

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#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Heji Shin

Although the German-Korean artist Heji Shin attained wider popularity through her photographs for the Spring/Summer 2017 collection of the New York-based brand Eckhaus Latta, which featured explicit images of couples of varying ethnicities and sexual orientations engaging in sexual acts, the true scandal arrived with her portraits of the American rapper Kanye West, who recently elicited controversy through his relationship with the incumbent president of the United States…

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#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Karolina Wojtas

Polish artist Karolina Wojtas doubtless has a lot of fun creating her photographs and installations. This usually seems inconsistent with the depth of thought her photographs suggest. Even so, this is exactly what her photographs are: a fluid mix of various kinds of humor, bizarre elements, practical jokes, children’s jokes, and bullying…

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Taste Fotograf #37

#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Alžběta Bačíková

While Alžběta Bačíková’s experimental approach to documentary puts the transparency of the filmic medium in parenthesis, this self-reflexive attitude does not operate at the expense of creating an empathic relation between artist and protagonist, subject and viewer…

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#37 uneven ground — Profiles

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

One hot summer day, I happened to reach for H. G. Wells’s 1923 novel Men Like Gods. In it, Wells presents his idea of the world of Utopia. People here are precisely carved castings of ancient deities representing the ideal potential development of our society at some point millenia in the future…

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Borders of Documentary
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