Willie Osterman on series Before Me by Jelena Blagović

Receiving a love letter is a private and sacred moment. Regardless of the receiver’s feelings toward the writer, a love letter cuts to the heart. Everyone knows what love is. I believe everyone has feelings of love in one form or another be it from parents, spouse, friends or a secret lover. Sometimes this secret lover surprises you with a flurry of emotion as you open the envelope. Occasionally the emotion breathes with it the spirit of another that merges with your psyche.

Love letters are a key. The key approaches the lock to someone’s heart. The synchronicities of the two have many paths. Like love, the letters are impermanent. Often the one who receives them tucks them away into a precious box to hide them and save them for later. As time progresses the box may fill and perhaps from the most recent, the freshest one may be chosen.

Years following as the ink sets and the impressions fade the box is occasionally discovered. ‘It is silly to revisit those old times’ she may say. But contained in them are memories as exacting as photographs; memories that evoke the softness and tenderness our skin once had. If she pulls out the box she can relive those moments through ink on paper. They become a window to the past. They present an ability to re-experience the emotions that started perhaps in adolescence. It is a moment that we all share in our own private way even if we have never received such a letter nor wrote one.

For the sender the moment the letter is sealed and the hesitation before dropping it into the post there is anticipation, a wanting, a longing, a primal urge. Often times the intensity is increased by the call to military duty. The soldier wants her more because he has time to anticipate the future and the distance gives him perhaps too much time to consider how he feels.

Sometimes these letters are sent to a locked heart. The distance is then easier to hide behind for the receiver. But for the writer, he continues to search for the key and consistently questions how he can scribe feelings on paper and find the key to open the heart.

Throughout history love letters have aroused our curiosity. Napoleon Bonaparte was a prolific writer of letters. He reportedly wrote as many as 75,000 in his lifetime, many of them to his beautiful wife, Josephine. Ludwig van Beethoven, one of history's most famous and mysterious composers, died at the age of 57 with one great secret. Upon his death, a love letter was found among his possessions. It was written to an unknown woman who he simply called his ‘Immortal Beloved’.

But how are famous writers of love letters any different from the words contained in the images presented here? Those written by famous writers are penned, perhaps, in a way that makes the best use of the intonations of the language and fullest expressions. But, as I research and read from the famous and those inscribed in these photographs I see little difference in intent and passion. For some things there is a universal language and that is the language of love.

As I read what is revealed in the images, bits of emotion are shown and carefully arranged by the photographer. These excerpts alone read like a poem written in the form of a love letter:

“You are…”

“Queen”

“I am…”

“For…”

“It was…”

“No…”

“It isn’t”

“Understand”

“For love…”

“Ours”

“Please come back…”

“One boy has fallen in love with you…”

“I can’t…”

“I can’t even.”

“I see”

“Your were probably asleep…”

“For a long, long time…”

“My loved one…”

“When I was…”

“You told me that I am…”

“It has to be”

“I pray…”

“…a love”

Do the words we can read in the photographs by the artist’s careful placement reveal sentiments that create a new love letter from her to her mother? Did this process transform a mother-daughter relationship into a new one shared by two women?  Or is it perhaps something more universal? Does it represent a universal love letter that offers a collective conscious of love to all of humankind?

In today’s fast moving world one can easily go to the Internet and see hundreds of letters that can be used to send to prospective loves. Just fill in your name and push a button. In this world of electronic communication speed becomes the key and emotion is a by-product of the combination of others’ works. Being born in time when electronics did not exist I feel that ‘electronic love’ is cheating and less than real. For me that is true, as that is what I know. Part of the generational tension arises from the old generation not understanding the new because that is not how they did it. The tension is created by the new generation because they do not have the memories that parents do. They enter into their child’s love based on all they know, learned and remember because they want what is best for the next generation. Is it then memory of how one generation learned that interferes with the next? But consider if we had no ability to remember. Could this collection of letters be seen as an inventory of possible DNA for the creator of these resulting images?

The letters presented in this exhibition represent the memories of possibilities. How did things change over time in the mind of the receiver of those letters? How did the inventory of these letters and resulting memories change the reception of the next letter? The original letters are used as a re-representation in these images. The photographer artfully arranges the letters and records them to be printed; again as ink on paper.

Through out my many years of photographing, teaching, curating and looking at innumerable photographs my fascination with the medium remains. I do not know why. As I am in constant curiosity about what images represent, I am still not quite sure what a photograph actually is, what it means, what it stands for or what really happens when we see an image regardless if it is from a family album, in an exhibition or an advertisement. A description by the American photographer Stephen Shore helps to clarify this:

“A photograph can be viewed on several levels. To begin with, it is a physical object,

a print. On this print is an image, an illusion of a window on to the world.

It is on this level that we usually read a picture and discover its content: a souvenir

of an exotic land, the face of a lover, a wet rock, a landscape at night. Embedded in this

level is another that contains signals to our mind’s perceptual apparatus. It gives ‘spin’

to what the image depicts and how it is organized.” ¹

These levels form the social fabric and in time represent the remains of a culture. How often do we look at old newspapers (stored in electronic media) to see evidence of what was? Photographs offer visual proof that this event happened; it existed; here is proof. The images created by Ms. Blagovic present visual evidence of very private and personal events. When I was told of the project I was thinking they would be offered at  face value (literally), meaning that they would be laid flat on the scanner and reproduced. If that were the case then why not exhibit the original letters? Why not lay them bare before the world for all to read the personal and private details? If so it would redefine voyeurism and would be blatant abuse of the relationship that once was between mother and daughter & receivers and writers.

When I first viewed the work I was impressed (and a little surprised) by the simplicity, diversity and careful control of what was offered. To take a stack of private and intimate letters from your mother and think of how to photograph them takes time. Together at first mother and daughter read the letters about the times that the writers hoped would be and then they discussed the times that were. After a certain comfort level was attained (time does that) the artist worked alone investigating the artifacts as raw material and arranging them for her canvas.

In one image I can see a frame full of the tops of letters, each numbered in succession. At the top of the frame is the number 125. At the bottom of the frame is number 161. They are letters from the photographer’s father when he was serving in the army. Ultimately he won the competition while serving his obligatory time for his country and his yet to be born offspring. The receiver of the letters wrote numbers on them as they were arriving thus adding, in a subtle way, the counting of the memories until he returned.

The photographic results are diverse. The precision of what is seen and unseen shows a competent use of the medium and thereby enhances the comment. They are controlled and contrived. There are stacks of letters presented in some and in others we can see only individual words. The colors are subtle but relevant. Postmarks and stamps reveal distance as well as political and historic relevance. One postmark shows an image of President Tito. In another the stamp is from Jasenovac. Another shows only the written words Island Krk where the receiver has spent summers since 1960. The culmination of letters and photographs then become a sort of history. It is a personal history that, in some ways, represents a culture. Also it is a photographic history that is the culmination of a young woman’s impressions. These impressions have made her who she is and has forever changed the relationship of mother and daughter, while presenting a universally shared impression of the wants of love.

¹ Stephen Shore, ‘The Nature of Photographs’, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2007, p10