Marina Viculin on series Foto studio City by Boris Cvjetanović

Boris was telling me about storytellers, and yet he is the greatest storyteller of all. He was telling me about storytellers in non-material cultures. About the ones that preserve the thousand-years-old stories. He was telling me this as we looked at the photographs of the Australian sandy coastline that looks out to the end of the world. He stood in a place where Indian Ocean and the Pacific flow together and where the Aboriginal storytellers stood thousands of years before him. Open space, the ocean with only Antarctica behind it…

-          That’s palpable, that open space?

I am looking at him and I realize that I am entangled, happily caught up in the stories. Through the story he took me out of an ugly pink café to a place whose transience can be mesmerizing: “Photo studio City”. It’s getting dark, as it does in every good sentimental story…

…There was a little house covered in nylon and inside it was all shipshape. Of course as much as that’s possible…the towel covering the table was clean and cardboard against the wall new… Inside lived a woman… she invited me in.

We are alone in the café and nobody is coming in. As if it is an impolite thing to do. Not even the waiter is to be seen anywhere. Perfect. Boris is talking and in the dark only his shots are illuminated on the screen. I am thinking how I am afraid of the sentiment, and these stories of Boris are pure sentiment. Stories about places which are disappearing. I wonder where people go when their scenes of life cease to exist?

I was taking shots of old Trnje for architects, whose new buildings would pop up here in a few months, a year… I like those situations when things are on the verge of disappearing. So naturally I took more photographs than was required. There were even  situations where I faced aggression… They were ticked off by my camera pointing to the shack they lived in. Four irritated males came out, made more aggressive by the beer. It was either you are going to drink with us or there is going to be trouble… And so I drank with them… They were war vets. The explanation that he was taking pictures because new housing was to be built here soon did not placate them at all. In fact they stated with confidence that “there ain’t gonna be any building going on here”… In a matter of few months the shacks were gone. He had taken a shot of a door standing up and keeping from view a life that unfolded behind. He took another shot of them several months later as they lied on the ground among the scattered belongings of its former residents. There was nothing else left…

Boris Cvjetanovic is made up of sentiments, of the matter I would love to be able to remove surgically from my life. He had captured old Trnje, Vrbik, he had taken pictures of those parts of the city which are virtually gone or on their way out. The shack stood up, four slightly aggressive men came out, but that did not save them. They are gone. Only sentimental traces are left behind. I wonder why I am afraid of sentimentality?

It is unusual that I hadn’t noticed that Boris’ photographs are stories. He always captures a detail that not only sets photography in motion, makes an incision, a counterpoint of the unusual but, always sets the story in motion. I hadn’t noticed before that Boris Cvjetanovic’s photography is so explicitly narrative.

Each frame is a story and discourse carefully chosen, clearly structured, and consistently carried out. The torn-down shack in Trnje we come to know through several stories, through several frames which form not a photo sequence but a narrative one. I would say that that which is photographed over a period of a few days or months cannot be called a photo sequence because in the dimension determined by shutter speed it captures events sequentially.

Narrative sequence captures pivotal points: the shack, the residents, the encounter between the residents and the photographer, the remains of the demolished shack, the close-up – the details of an abruptly interrupted life: Cedevita and the globe, the door laid down with its decorative tag… The discourse is  demarcated by a clearly visible outline of the black border of the untouched frame which quite contradictorily enhances the appearance of arbitrariness of the cutout. And arbitrary cutout is just as in allover painting a way to capture the infinite, that which has no outline. At the same time Boris’ discourse tries to look utmost discreet. That means that he as the thinking subject is quite aware of the aggressive in each shot but he chooses the subdued, the invisible as his way of conveying a story. In this way he pulls me in his story unawares… Such is Boris’ discourse…