Tone Stojko: The Body in Play

 A 25-year career as a photo-journalist and photo editor at Mladina, 300,000 theatre photographs, over 32,000 faces immortalised by his camera, some 1,500 theatre and dance performances captured in moving images along with his underwater recordings – the artist’s most recent passion – is a body of work which is impressive not only in numerical terms but encompasses some of the most recognisable images of the key moments in Slovenia’s political history, the icons of creativity impressed in the cultural past, and superbly documented stage performances of Slovenian theatre companies. Stojko acts as the key chronicler of images of our time, yet what gives a special character to each of those images is the artist’s ability to communicate a more profound message contained in the situations and people he photographs.

The Body in Play exhibition put on in the Jakopič Gallery gives an insight into his most recent creative production involving 75 colour photographs of female nudes in movement which sometimes subtly even cross the borders of abstraction. The photographer achieves this with a skilful stroke of his camera. In thematic terms, Stojko looks as far back as to 1974 when a cycle of his photographs bearing the same title first gives birth to the idea of blurring a female body’s moving figure – the present exhibition also involves eight black-and-white photographs from the said cycle. At the time of their creation, Andrej Medved wrote: "In movement, dance, ecstasy the body-and/as-play is shown, the body in play, which is simultaneously truth and appearance, that is to say, the whole truth as the abyss and fullness, chaos and order, neatness and disarray of play."

In the last decade, Stojko has been applying an upgraded artistic approach and, clearly influenced by theatre photography, sensitively studying the phenomenon of photographic abstraction. This has brought him back to the same uncapturable object whose movement he follows in the very act of photographing, i.e. by moving his camera. New dimensions in those photographs are opened up by the colour technique – the body in movement is thus no longer an outline, a shadow, a trace, but is instead embedded in an ethereal atmosphere of warm colours, of the light of fire. Gesture and abstraction – two dimensions typical of painting – are thereby introduced into photography by the master of photography who has been engaged in experimenting with the female nude since the 1970s. In this manner, Stojko’s photography embarks on a level of communication with the viewer that is no longer bound to the understanding of a certain historical event, a line of aesthetics, a specific performative gesture – by viewing the motive, one can experience the essence of a woman who is not only fragile, delicate, pleasant, but also elementary, fatal and even bestial. What is more, she does not consist in her physical appearance only – instead, the matrix of her physical image is being doubled on the level of her ethereal, spiritual body.

In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, philosopher Dr Mojca Puncer adds: "Bodies disappear by blurring boundaries of a physical form. This kind of abstraction brings de-subjectivisation: all social and cultural representations are forced to take flight. The body is only allegorically shown in the interplay of light and shadow. Body silhouettes from the photographs look like pretty spectres. Although the tendency to show the naked female body as an aesthetic form is very obvious, Stojko does not frame it in a symmetrical composition because the aspect of symmetry decomposition is ever present. Blurred female bodies express their presence through mediated frozen moments of movement. The blurring of a body in an image can also be an allusion to the many obscurities of female bodies in past and present social realities. Blurring and capturing bodies in motion mutually take place along the continuum of presence – disappearance – representation."

—Marija Skočir