Tihomir Pinter: The Chemistry of the Image

Tihomir Pinter was born in Bjelovar, Croatia, on 19 January 1938, and attended primary and grammar school there. From 1954 to 1958 he attended the Military Medical College in Ljubljana. Both his studies and his career as a pharmacist took him to the capitals of various republics of the former Yugoslavia: from Ljubljana to Sarajevo, and from Zagreb to Belgrade. Wherever he lived, he devoted much of his spare time to photography and was an active member of a number of photo clubs. He kept in touch with developments in the field of photography and not only participated in group exhibitions, but also had a number of solo shows. Between 1969 and 1981 he was regularly ranked among the ten most successful exhibition photographers in Slovenia and the then-Yugoslavia.

In 1966, at the suggestion of the City Museum of Sisak, Pinter started photographing ironworks, embarking on a body of work which is today seen as one of his most important creative periods. He was fascinated by the carefully thought-out compositions and tonal richness in the works of the Slovenian photographer, Slavko Smolej. Yet Pinter’s own style increasingly diverged from that of documentary photography as he became more and more interested in a purely visual approach to reality and the quest to find ways of abstracting it. In many respects, his goal was not unlike that of many painters: traces of expressionism and lyricism, chiaroscuro and printmaking can all be found in Pinter’s photography. So it was a logical development when, after joining the food science laboratory at the Ljubljana Military Hospital in 1975 and settling here with his family, Pinter started visiting renowned Slovenian artists in their studios. That same year, the International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP) awarded him their AFIAP (Artiste FIAP) distinction, and this was followed by the EFIAP (Excellence FIAP) distinction in 1975. 1975 was also the year in which he was awarded a doctorate in food chemistry from the University of Zagreb (Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry).

Pinter’s photographs were first published in monograph form in 1984: the Državna založba Slovenije publishing house brought out his first book of photographic portraits of artists, under the title Umetnik v ateljeju (Artist in the Studio). In 2008, Modrijan published Umetniki v ateljeju (Artists in the Studio) and Trenutki z umetniki, 1/125 (Moments with Artists, 1/125), and in 2012, Pasadena published his fourth portrait collection, Atelje in umetniki (The Studio and the Artists). A solo exhibition of his works was held at the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana in 1990, and after this his photographs of authors appeared weekly in the Književni listi supplement of the Delo newspaper. After he retired in 1990, Pinter devoted even more time to portraits of fine artists and authors. From 1994 he added composers to his list of subjects. He set up his own photographic studio a year later, and started focusing on studio portraits.

Pinter’s first thematic retrospective, Razžarjeni pogled (A Glowing View), was held at the Regional Museum of Carinthia in 2006, and was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue containing 110 of his photographs of ironworks. This was followed by a retrospective of his portraiture at the Lamut Salon in Kostanjevica na Krki in 2007, and in 2013 a selection of his early works were shown as part of the Vintage exhibition at the Galerija Fotografija in Ljubljana.

The current exhibition is accompanied by a book that includes an in-depth art-historical study of both the extent and the significance of Pinter’s oeuvre, as well as comprehensive documentation compiled from Pinter’s personal archive (now held at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana), and just under 150 reproductions of black and white photographs created in Pinter’s darkroom.

Tihomir Pinter: The Chemistry of the Image

"Tihomir Pinter: The Chemistry of the Image" exhibition is accompanied by a book that includes an in-depth art-historical study of both the extent and the significance of Pinter’s oeuvre, as ...

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