15 June 2016
PRESS RELEASE
Vžigalica Gallery
Jože Suhadolnik: Photo Stories 35
Mid-career retrospective
23 June 2016–28 August 2016
You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the exhibition Photo Stories 35 on
Thursday, 23 June 2016, at 7.00 p.m. at the Vžigalica Gallery in Ljubljana.
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 blackand-black expression of his, in which the spectator may uncover a thousand shades of its
message.
Marija Skočir
ACCOMPANYING EVENT
Guided exhibition tour with the author and one of the curators
Friday, 24 June at 5 p.m.
Thursday, 25 August at 6 p.m.
***
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: Ljubljana Municipality - European Green Capital
***
Photo: Jože Suhadolnik, Istanbul, 2013