Fotograf Magazine

Juraj Lipscher (b. 1948) (http://www.lipscher.ch) is a college professor in Baden, Switzerland. In the mid-1990s he had an enticing exhibition entitled “Distant Times and Distant Places” in the now stagnant Czech industrial center of Kladno. The images of industrial sites, particularly steelworks, foundries and old factories in the exhibition catalogue were accompanied by poetic insights from his return trips to Slovakia. We learn about his Baudelarian reminiscences during visits in Klížská Nemá and on the Velkolélský Island: he felt like “a dealer in clouds, peddling ancient hollow weeping and merry willows, silence, and especially light of peculiar provenance.” And as though in passing he described his point of departure: “While photographing in Slovakia I thrived on the dichotomy between my closeness to my former homeland and my distance from it caused by twenty years of absence. Oscillating between two worlds, between the identity of a native and one of a visitor, between closeness and distance was the driving force of my work and caused an interesting distortion in my way of seeing .”