Ljubljana
MGML
Jože Suhadolnik: Photo Stories 35
© Matevž Paternoster/MGML

Match Gallery

Trg francoske revolucije 7
1000 Ljubljana

T +386 1 24 12 590
T +386 1 24 12 500
E galerija.vzigalica@mgml.si


Tuesday–Sunday: 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Monday: Closed
1 January, 1 November, 25 December: Closed
24 and 31 December: 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

Free entry.


Jože Suhadolnik: Photo Stories 35

23. 6. 2016–28. 9. 2016

In his 35-year-long career as a photojournalist, Jože Suhadolnik collaborated with the Mladina weekly, the Dnevnik daily, the former Razgledi magazine, and with global press agencies Reuters, Associated Press and European Pressphoto Agency. Today he works at the Delo daily, where until recently he served as photography editor. Throughout his career he visited numerous hot spots around the globe.

The Photo Stories 35 exhibition brings together three and a half decades’ work by a photographer who has marked Slovenian media as well as the sphere of original photography. The chosen photo stories to be exhibited feature diverse topics, some of which have held the author's attention throughout his career, whereas others are to be found in certain projects reflecting current developments.

With a certain amount of nostalgia, and particularly of critical distance, the exhibition will reminiscence the traditional photo essay form that was frequently used in the golden era of international illustrated magazines, such as Life, Look, Picture Post, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and VU, from their early development in the 1920s and 1930s to their demise in the early 1970s – which was supposedly due to the supremacy of the television medium. As a matter of fact, the photo essay had never quite found its place in Slovenian media, yet pioneering photography editors of certain newspapers succeeded in securing photography a legitimate position in daily newspapers, as well as weeklies and magazines. Today, photography, and with it photojournalists might be putting up their biggest fight ever for their right to endure in newspapers and among editors. But despite everything, photojournalists whose presentations feature a strong signature mark, Jože Suhadolnik being one of them, have succeeded in reaching further – to progress from newspaper spreads into galleries, zines, photo monographs – where their photographs have become a rarity, a museum item or artefact. What they are thus putting into focus is their eviction from their primary environment, which, rather than the appearance of new media, was due to the tendency to obscure the visual messages that were too revealing of the contemporary society, and due to the self-interested neocapitalist way of thinking that had even been assumed by supposed messengers of democracy.

Istanbul, Chernobyl, Armenia, Mornings in Russia, Zatolmin Cheesemakers, Eritrea, Circus, Punk, Mexico, Carnival Rawnsk pust, Refugees, Centre for People with Developmental Disabilities, Trbovlje and Ausländer, 14 series turned photo essays that were created by Suhadolnik in the past 35 years alongside his photojournalist career. Infused with his personal poetics, they present us with a complex narrative of the author's career, of his sensitive, critical, yet embracing photographer's gaze overcoming geographical and temporal shifts with ease. Owing to his subtle mind he is able to discern distinctiveness, the subcultures and communities that are possibly treated in society as completely obscure, yet when looked at through his lens, they are granted the right to coexist within our civilisation and recent history. Infallibly original, and loyal to the documentary genre to a great extent, yet not exclusively, his photo stories contain a piercing, puzzling note, a constricted feel of anticipation, a premonition of emptiness, but actually turn out to be faithful narratives, in other words, photographer's experience of manifest reality. Suhadolnik's black-and-white technique often exceeds itself: his search for the light in precious blacks leads into a black-and-black expression of his, in which the spectator may uncover a thousand shades of its message.

—Marija Skočir

Colophon

Production: Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana
Exhibition curators: Marija Skočir, Jani Pirnat
Design: Bojan Lazarevič – Agora Proars
Gallery prints: Fotoformat
The exhibition was made possible by: City of Ljubljana – European Green Capital    

Match Gallery

Trg francoske revolucije 7
1000 Ljubljana

T +386 1 24 12 590
T +386 1 24 12 500
E galerija.vzigalica@mgml.si


Tuesday–Sunday: 10 a.m.–6 p.m.
Monday: Closed
1 January, 1 November, 25 December: Closed
24 and 31 December: 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

Free entry.


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