W Cieniu Fotografii by Magda Stanova
During six years of studying photography at an art academy my interest has moved away from the “pure” photograph and focused up on the snapshots that people take of family, friends, holidays, vacations, and group images. Snapshots have an enormous value for the person who is either a part of, or somehow related to, the people or place that has been photographed. But how does a photograph get this value? Why is photography such a fascinating medium? The work in this series, titled “In the Shadow of Photography”, is a visual essay on photography that attempts to answer these questions. The work consists of three chapters. The first is searching for the specifics of photography; the second investigates photographic world; and the third is examining how the behavior and thinking of people has changed since the invention of photography. The exhibition is including topics such as: photography as a time traveling machine; why a person has a stage fright while being photographed; how the present is becoming a stage for the future; or how are we loosing the possibility to get an authentic memory from a photographic attempt to conserve it. These reflections are presented through the mediums of drawing, text, collages, photographs, objects, video and animation.
