Marina Viculin on the work of Josip Klarica

When I began writing this piece – as always by skimming over some of my previous writings – I realized that when writing about photographs of artists who interest me I virtually always write about the way in which they record time through photography.

It seems to me now that no other form – not even film – records the experience, or, if you will, the problem of time – with the sophistication that the photography does. I’ve become fascinated by the idea that image production affords room for recording the dimension – which often seems to me quite personal, or better yet as a very important dimension of the internal image of each one of us.

I’m a storyteller. A friend of mine said recently:

-          You should write?

What else should I do but write? What did he mean? What did he wishwant to convey?say? Am I to write a novel? Fiction? No, I do something different, I record. I’ll refrain for now from delving into the definition of that which I wish to record.

I look and try to write it down, record it. I grapple with the kind of experience that resists recording because the matrix set up by language – the words and syntax – is of a different sort and at odds with the character of experiential perception, empirical comprehension I record. Then to the fore come metaphor, metonymy, rhythm and imagery... And here arises a misunderstanding because they all point to emotions and what I do surely has nothing to do with emotions.

It’s about comprehending through experience and not about going through…

Recording Time through Photography

I will describe two events that have urged me to try and recount experience and raise the question about the comprehension of recording of time through photography. Does the character of time depend on photography, or to what extent can technology of photo production itself determine the character of recorded time?

Just as many times before, it seemed to me at first I had touched upon a subject new to me, only to discover all too quickly that in fact I have been talking about this all along in my own writings. Starting out from different positions I always end up in the same place.

So this time around, having delved into the problem of time I have come to realize that each one of my pieces on photography essentially deals with a problem of time.

A photograph records time more so than a film or a video. And yet it is static!

Perhaps I may say – carried away here at the outset and by the discovery - that photography in some peculiar way deals with time, deals with the recording of time, more so than with anything else. All other elements: both the motif and the medium are only a way to record the variances in the passing and, maybe, the experiencing of time (is it possible that these two things can differ from one another?). I am talking about time as one of the dimensions of reality.

Klarica and Sandro

First I saw the photographs by Josip Klarica. Many of them. More than a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty.

I had seen them before but never so many at once. Quantity is important, it generates a punch, infection or a vision…

-          They weigh a ton, they are heavier than the heaviest thing imaginable, heavier than the heaviest one from the table of elements

You pick up a photograph and see that which was recorded. The recorded thing is not a motif. I wish to say that what I see when looking at a photograph is much more and often quite different from what in words would be pinned down as the motif or the scene depicted on a photograph. How? I see the recorded, the noted, with my eyes but I comprehend it with the body.

I have tried to articulate what I see in Klarica’s photographs, what is so significantly different from anything else I had seen up to that point.

-          Density! Density has been pushed to the limit here. To the pre-explosive state.

This sounds very general and commonplace. And then again this is the most specific thing I’m capable of saying. At hand is simply and exclusively a story about the power of an image. Klarica’s photographs are extracts, essences, crystallizations of a powerful “image“.

Then quite accidentally I had a talk with Sandro Đukić the next day. He is not a photographer and cameraman like Klarica, but from the outset an artist who chose video and digital photography as the medium for his workOn nije kao Klarica fotograf i snimatelj već polazi s pozicija umjetnika koji je odabrao video i digitalnu fotografiju kao medij za svoj rad.  Each image has its own factual profile – how large it was when it was shot, when it was stored, when opened, where it is located – each one has its own meta-data alter ego. It fully determines it and can replace the picture in Sandro’s system.

So the archive can be presented in printed form ofin a book or as frames on a wall.

What remains? Can the density of time be defined by pixels in an image?

Sandro raised another issue. He produced shots from a video recording. They had to be recreated, turned back into a representation.

So the video lasting 2 minutes and 10 seconds was printed out as a series of scenes that constitute a one-hundred page book full of tiny windows with representations, around 20 of them per page! Sandro entitled it “The Reality of Image – the Image of Reality”.

-          Through printing I’ve lost touch with the real analog material, and I wanted to get closer to reality…

Through digitalization and multiplication Sandro has quite apparently watered down the reality of an image to the utmost degree. The reality of a photograph.

But how? In what way? Does the technique itself, the technology, be it analog or digital, chemical or mechanical, have anything to do with the recording of time in photography?

My first and rash reaction would probably be:

-          There’s not.

But I’m afraid that’s not true. The sudden, unexpected and quite accidental contact between Klarica and Đukić in my own spatial-temporal continuum resulted in a eureka effect of sort. It occurred to me that this was quite clearly and evidently the question of reproduction of the observed – perceived - velocity and density of time.

Let’s stick only to these two qualities – the velocity and density – although I intimately think this is a way, the shaping and experiencing of reality and that it contains many qualities.

Klarica’s Gilded Copy

And now we come to the central question of relationship between technology selected and the presentation of time. To the characteristics of personal time. To time’s connection with the technique itself and to the way in which characteristics of a photograph themselves retain the recorded time of genesis and the creator’s experience of time. Only in the image? In its technological traits? Or?

-          Using the enlarger you lose about 30% of the quality, the most fragile tonal values get lost.

Josip Klarica was born in 1946; he tells us that the Klaricas are originally from around Zadar where they got their last name in the 16^th century as the serfs of the Order of St. Clare. He graduated from the Camera Department in Prague.

All his photographs are made using contact copying. The entire stack of a two hundred photographs he prepared for his retrospective exhibition, for our exhibition at Galerija Klovićevi dvori, has been made using contact-copying technique.

The negative is pressed against the photosensitive emulsion; the image is the same size as the negative. The photograph so produced is most similar, most closely related to that, which was recorded on the camera's emulsion, inscribed onto the film's photosensitive matter by the ray of light conveying the message about the scene.

We see. I see and so does Klarica, but what will be recorded depends on the materials and technologies of recording used. They evolve and are not always concurrent with the evolution of our perception system. Our perceptive system is not only the eye, ear or simply our disposition…

-          Since when do you do contact copies only?

-          Since 1974.

-          You've been doing nothing but contact copies for 30 years?

-          Nothing else!

As I look at his still-life photographs from the seventies and eighties, his legends about Hercules and Kafkaesque scenes from the nineties, it becomes clear to me that Klarica's photography belongs to the type of works which in fact constitute only one work. Some ancient work in progress.

I'm aware that there have always existed those rare artists who spent a lifetime constructing one single piece of work. Klarica belongs to that kind. He posited the problem some thirty years ago and he is still approaching it.

Recollection Going Back a 100 Years

In talking with Klarica I've realized that his recollection reaches back much deeper than mine, that his spatial-temporal frame goes deeper and further back than his lifetime – almost to 1900. Astonishingly far back.

The fields our mind occupies, the fields that are personal spatial-temporal realities seem not be identical for each one of us. They naturally differ by generations, but apparently that isn't the only difference. There are people…

I cannot speak for you but my spatial-temporal field is much narrower than my lifetime, it is positioned somewhere between present and future. I have greater awareness of what might happen than what did happen, than that which is history. There is no qualitative determination here…

-          Why do you only employ the technique of directly copying from film onto paper?

-          Well, I have told you. That is the most noble and the highest-quality process, the best approximation of tonalities, tonal values. I've told you – by going through two optical systems you lose around 30%.

Somewhere in the first step thirty percent gets lost by using electricity, small negatives and an enlarger. Thirty percent of what? Of tonal values or reality? Do details and richness of tones constitute the image of our reality? Is my reality as dense as Klarica's or as thin as Sandro's – dissolved in multiple analog-digital transformations.

The photo paper Josip Klarica uses for copying his photographs is no longer being made. That is, no longer is the best self-copying paper which is exposed to the daylight available. This artist-photographer makes the paper himself for his personal needs! Of course, even Klarica's opus numbers only a few photographs of this kind.

Looking from the point of view of art, it is not surprising that an artist himself produces the supplies he needsmaterials needed for his work. But things are not as simple in this regard when it comes to photography and photo images. What we see in a photograph was indeed in front of the camera's lens. «It was» - says Roland Barthes. It is a part of realty. A photograph is an image of the real and as such itself becomes a part of reality.

But the catch is that it «was», in the past, and the photograph before us «is», it exists in the present. A recorded situation, a recorded image does not point to a hypothetical situation or a thing; it is the image of that very thing at a particular point in time. There werewas no alternatives, no stand-ins – the thing itself stood before the lens at the time of recording. Without that element there is no photography and that, according to Barthes, is the true essence of photography.

How long was that point in time? Is that important? Is that a dimension that greatly determines the way I see?

-          It does seem that way!              

By rejecting the modern technology he changes the modern density of time. Of course, I speak of what I can experience, touch; comprehend – about the experience and perception of time. Why is Klarica’s density different? Which quality of photography allows himit to record this?

Klarica lays his large negative – the largest format is 18 x 50 cm – on the self-copying paper he made by covering a hard water-color paper with an emulsion, steadies it with a piece of glass and exposes it to sunlight. It visibly grows darker. He controls it by eye only!

When the paper darkens Klarica takes it inside and rinses it in the mildest soak, regular water. After washing off the oxidized silver halogenide he fixes the picture in a gilding solution. Thus each grain of silver halogenide is coated by gold and turns permanent.

Photographs of Second Acceleration

It sounds magical and wonderful but in fact this technology is old and widely known. The point of the story is that Klarica doesn’t use this technology so his photographs would look as if they were created long ago but rather because that’s the only way he can record his vision.

And finally one very important thing – his photographs do not look as if though they were created many years ago – they do not have the tendency to antedate. Klarica simply records what he sees, what we, convinced there is agreement about the term, superficially call the reality.

Klarica’s photographs belong to their own as well as our moment, but they carry a different mark of density and velocity of time.

Here I am primarily interested in how technology, velocity and slowness of production can provide a visually legible record of that. Why is it that from Klarica’s photographs I read a completely different dimension of time than from any of the digital photographs – or the recreated video recording – by Sandro Đukić? Is it because of the lost tonal values as Klarica claims? Digital technology is capable of being more precise, of providing more details and tones. It seems, however, that that’s not it.

What he records cannot, for some other visual reasons, be recorded by traditional enlargement of Laica negatives, let alone digital technology.

Density of Time

Time is a dimension and, surely, it is visible. To a greater or lesser degree, depending on where in the visible spectrum we perceive it?

Everything Klarica does is so slow that often he doesn’t require an old-fashioned clock let alone some electronic device for precise measuring of time. The exposing of both film and paper are exposed for such a last so long time that they leave room for improvisation!

This way of work affords flexibility, but on the other hand there are no explicit directions from the a manufacturer. Working with home-made products requires a different and extensive understanding of the entire process of how an image production from start to finishis generated.

I can only conclude that it is not that this technology is so much obsolete asold but that it is personal. Therefore, technology is definitely a matter of choice and of artist's predilectiondisposition.

The Space

Klarica was able to build his own camera because of his Having the profound understanding of the entire process of productioncreation of a photographic image, an image of just the right rhythm and tone, an image that capturesis precisely of the rhythm and tone he needs, the image that records his inner state. He built onepicture, Klarica has made the camera himself. One of the several large- format cameras he uses. Of course, he requires special cameras for large negatives, which later on he can be transformed later on turn into photographs using the contact-sheet copying method. Wide-angle cameras are a special treat. A negative from his large wide-angle camera is half a meter in size!long! Exposing film on a wide-angle camera takes place not only in time but in space as well since the through the shifting of the aperture of the lens literally moves, that is in space!

An artist Mirjana Vodopija was the first to point out the important truth of howthat skin is the only sense that actually capable of penetratingpenetrates the third dimension. And in order to become cognizant of the touch and “the power to think through one’s with the skin”, it is was necessary to turn off the temperature sensors. This for the heat and cold. The awareness came about on one summer night when the temperature reached 36.6°C. In Klarica’s photography, which that is of extremely fine detail and nuance, the third dimension is capturedrealized through the sensuality of textures: the black satin, the snow on a plate, the liquid, the surface on gypsum casts; but. But also the fog, the cool morning air, gentle spring leaves, the water surface on a small lake…

Crystallizations of the Powerful “Staging”

WhenceFrom where do these scenes draw their powers? From the unusual conflict? From foreshadowing? From formal references?quotes? I will try and gradually get under the skin of the photographed. 

For starters, let us think about Kafka as Klarica’s favorite narrative tissue. It is a good place to probe photography the way it appears in Klarica’s opus, in his approach. There is a major difference between the fictional which only now and then points out its questionable link with the reality (autobiographical elements?) and that which was in front of the camera’s lens, that which undoubtedly belongs to the real world.

I will try and simplify. Kafka’s stories draw much of their power from false familiarity, the tiny gap between the functional and the experienced. Sometimes I think I could say that this the gap is virtually undetectable.as narrow as can be. “The abysses of the surreal, the unreal and the hyper real  open up when deviationthe shift from the ordinaryusual is kept to a minimum.” That is why sometimes people look for autobiographical elements in Kafka’s work, the sense of premonition is recognized and often deemed oracular with respect toregarding some contemporary or recent historical events.

When talking about photography the capturedrecorded undoubtedly belongs to “that which actually happened”. But in Klarica’s work it seems that that level is not the defining one in Klarica’s work, it seems. We know the artist had to collect unusual objects making up his still life: the head of a large tuna, stuffed birds, the bust of a male mannequin, an antique fork, Sudek’s cup, bitsa bit of mirror… We know for sure there was one autumn dawn in the fall, when weighed down by heavy equipment he went in search of local landscape fogs; we know, that the light in which he captured the lake was that special color, that there was an oak or a plane-tree, and the narrative form of the rhyming trees. But we all wantwish to ignore these so we can get into the story. Just as we do not count the number of takes in a movie nor think about the way actors rehearseact it out, so in Klarica’s photography we do not wantwish to analyze the effort that went into it. Not We do not do that when we wish to get into the life of the story. In fact I can’t speak for you,  but I myself certainly wish to live through it first and understand it second.

The story, then. All of Klarica’s scenes are carefully crafted. I know it this does not sound convincing but, in fact , even his landscapes are visual constructs. How? The process of selecting the location, of finding the right angle and just, the camera type, of camera as well as the color and intensity of the light that come through carefully choosing the rightchosen time of day and even year are all is so well worked out and time consuming that we can trulyreally call it a concept and a construct.

What is that before us? What has Klarica constructed? Why? In our minds we associate photography with making an instanta fast record so that the slow process of selecting the object, the painstaking ordering about and shooting with a large-format camera with unexpectedly long exposures peaksdraws our interest.attention. What’s going on here?

It And it is difficult to grasp. By drawing a way of the parallel between the of captured time and technologies used I tried to reveal some of the sources behind Klarica’s photography. Its density. That density is visible in condensed spatial planes, in textures I called the sensuality of materials as I was unable to put it more precisely and vividly. This density, which shows in the narrative tissue, which abounds that is dense with series of  associations that which his each and every photograph offers to the dedicated recipient: the viewer, the reader, the enjoyer, the player.

We’ll agree without much debate that Klarica’s photographs can be easily classified as either still life or landscape photographs. I would say that all other represented objects can be placed in one of the two categories. Slightly unexpected, but telling. If I was to be governed by experience alone, without thinking I would say that those few live animals like the goat and the sheep under an olive tree fall into the landscape category, whereas the human faces in Klarica’s photographs are treated in the same fashion as those objects that constituteconstituting his nature morte. But I will try and confirm this by greater in-depth observation, by reading and playing with meaning of the visual symbols and their placement, with structure, planes, light, texture, series of associationsassociative lines, overlaps and finally the take on the approach to space within which I exist as the recipient of the work. I will talk about the narrative grammar of Klarica’s photography and its fixed relations, powerful signs and their placement whereby the image will draw us into its own intrinsic logic. I am also interested in how a photograph penetrates into our own reality, because the logic behind Klarica’s photography is the logic of a story accompanied by all essential narrativetold with all prominent elements, invisible stitches, and traps of good narration. But at the same time it is also a light recording of that which had transpired before the lens.

Klarica’s narrative fabricmaterial is open-ended, but consistent. It can appear hermetic but that is only a trap. It appears to conceal many ungraspable significations, but its symbols andas well as their conflicts feel so close and familiar. They are part of our world, they are part of the culture our feet are deeply planted into, and from which no matter how hard we try we are unable to divorce our thoughts. So all our tendencies to breakget out of the system are bound to failhopeless.

And so in this way the ungraspable and the hermetical quality transforms into openness, an attraction, the greatest source of unconstrained energy. How? When I look at a photograph photographs I see that  some signification has been embedded into a scene, into entwined in the scenes, in the photographed image; I see certain signification, certains; some significations, some signs. Images that are filled with full of recognizable symbols may turncool me off,  for what amshould I to do in a world full of clear-cut standards. But with Klarica it is different, he will amuse me, incite me to play. Why? His photographs abound with intertextuality and referencesquotes, either implicit of fictitious. Some hints that appear straightforwardassociations which are direct at a glancefirst sight are in fact sufficiently vague and wide open such that they allow for innumerable arrangements.combinations. So the game can begin.

Klarica’s Bricolage

Klarica’s photographs don’t wish to appear as dated even though they are characterized byalthough created using old-fashioned techniques, slow speed, fixed arrangement of with symbols, series of hints ordered in particular fashion, associative lines and man-madearranged compositions do not appear to want to be dated. They, in fact, appear amazingly contemporary.  And I do not think that anyone who knows how to look and is of our cultural milieu will never think of them as products of the pastto be looking at something that had been created long time before.

I have classified them as landscapes and still lives, but also I  and have ascertained that they are all constructs based on references.quotes. I have even dared to go so far and saysaid that even the landscapes are constructs. Is such a code tied with the contemporary. Can it be?

Photographs displayed at this exhibition were taken in the period from the have been captured in the seventies through today. Their contemporary character is conditional. They show no evolution, they are timeless or at least long-lived. living. Maybe they are just records of the cultural code of the western cyclecircle stripped bare? They are a series of reflections like as is the photograph depicting the gypsum head from 1984. Klarica’s compositions are painter-like. Planes are clearly separated as if constructed by a painter. The installation captured is set in the actual real landscape.

The In the center is occupied by the bust of a male mannequin. His He has his eyes have been drawn on and this brings himand thus comes to life and makes himbecomes the center. The mannequin’s look veers diagonally to the left diagonally and goes past the lens. He is situated in the center right half of the photograph. Made still by a heap of sand; to form the background for the rest of the installation the mannequin is surrounded by bitspieces of fishnet fabric, a wire mesh oflike the kind one used for fences and by the old, damaged and  dusty mirrors. The mannequin looking towards us is reflected in the bits of mirror behind him in both semi and full profile. The superimposing of meanings is listed as an by the interplay between the various fabric textures which in turn appearappearing as real or and as reflections in the mirrors. The installation is set within a landscape that was shotshoot as the deepest layer, but which is also visible as the filler on the mirror surfaces.

The head upon shoulders without the body suggests helplessness as well as gentleness. It incites empathy!  It signifies the helplessness of  reason deprived of without body. This is commonlyIt is frequently used in scenes where androids, having been reduced to a head only without a body keep on thinking, talking and understanding everything all except that which had happened to them. The story about the that a head of a decapitated turtle which goes on living for I do not know how long after it has been severed from the body is quite poignant. Why? Is it because the turtle remainscontinues to be conscious? Or is it that like the androids, who although more intelligent, better educated and quicker than humans, it has have trouble understanding that the head without body is all that it has they have left?

The scene ofwith the head severed from the body that keeps on going even though it has been severed from the body is one of the most poignant within the Western code. However, the mannequin on Klarica’s photograph never even had the body. He never even had the opportunity to share the android experience. His helplessness and melancholy are infinite, and multiplied by in the reflections.

We think in binary pairs. A vivid color causes in our eye the appearance of a complementary pair. What is the presence of one mannequin capable of causing? He is void, but truly so since, he has not been emptied, left without the body, and stripped of his identity;, he does not know what he is losing because he never hade it in the first place. He does not yearn because yearning entails an must have the object. The mannequin is one step beyond, maybeperhaps it is the allure of the  intangible void.

It is patently clear that the small heap of sand washad been put there so this cultural ikebana could stand still.be fixed. The act of arranging is not completely concealed, on top of the sand ithe is explicitly revealed by a peg fastening the fishnet fabric to the upper left corner of the mirror. These discreet elements act as warning signs: “Decipher the meaning since I am not here by accident”.

The sand and the peg are here to fasten that which cannot stand on its own, that which lacks its own source of energy. The tree stands by itself, so do the man and the dog, the hill is stable, but and the cultural ikebanas, much like Klarica’s constructed compositions that must have support to find their balance in the support. Along with the occasional peg, the small heap of sand, the occasional ambiguous association or «an empty referencea «vacant quote».

The scene within the shot is set up as a the stage that has been marked off on the sides in the foreground by dark and linear rusty wire fence, and light, and soft fishnet fabric. The left side of the imagined stage is pulled further back suggesting that the planes are not parallel and that our point of view has been shiftedis moved to the left side of the «audience», while the imaginary  stage ramp is parallel with the mannequin’s face.

It is great quite a bit of fun to give names to things images are made of. We think of them without names, as open. However, tacking onBut adding a name fixes them, limits them and always subtracts some of the signification, but also it adds to the power of the real.

-                      The uttered is molded.

Even photography has the power to make events look more real than the reality itself. It is easier for me to remember your face by looking at a photographphotographs than by recalling some of the things we experienced together. Gazing dissolves the reality of the experiential world.  But this does not apply to photography, because the photography is static and opens up to a view. And the mannequin is looking!

Behind the mannequin are mirrors, the sand is full of shells and periwinkles. The shells and periwinkles did are not come with the of that sand but were brought there to balance out the whiteness of the mannequin’s eyes. Eyeballs are dark chambers in which images take place. They are shells, of the a world that which cannot be penetrated because the penetration would destroydestroys it. I cannot see an image on my retina because in order to do that I would have to become someone else.get out of my own skin. Binary pair: eitherEither it is zero or it is one, either it passes through or it does not. We cannot see the image onin the retina in the dark inner chamber of the eye cavity. But we can imaginefantasize it. The inducedInduced image of the complementary pair is my serious reality. Like a dream, it is irrefutable.

It is undeniable like the dream. No doubt, it is here and that’s how we remember it. It can not be viewed wrong.  Mirrors are symbols of the reflected, they are pre-images. Dirty, broken and damaged mirrors are another thing altogether. The reflection of the The reflected mannequin is turning away from me and leaving. He is leaving me alone. I don’t feelfell sorry for that. There is something disturbing about his void. Rusty fence wirewires stuck to his nose, he is as smooth as the a periwinkle and has sensual lips. He has no arms,  and his the eyes which are the only thing he could use to communicate  look the other way.

The foreground is the place of conflict of three captured textures: the roughness of the wire, the suppleness of the fabric and the smoothness of the mannequin. When I speak of one of our five senses, namely touch, I imagine finger tips. ThatThis is precisely the precise place where  most of the pressure receptors are, but how do we sense the space.

What Mirjana Vodopija learned about experiencing space with the skin on one hot summer night, when the temperature outside matched her body temperature, is that skinit is a proprioceptive sense. The proprioceptive sense gives us the information about our position within space through our bones and skin!

Naturally, the interaction between the proprioceptive and the visual sense system and perception is what interests me. But here and now I am interested here and now in how Klarica builds the depth of space through interplay of brilliantly shot textures. The technology of slow shooting providesallows him with to a painstakingly rich record of textures. I use painstaking here to warn about the excess of information that the recorded surface of the rough wire, the fishnet fabric, and the surface processing on the industrial mannequin can provide. It is perhaps here that Klarica assemblages are transformed into art;. In the place where the crystal, unstable texture of snow and as well as the brilliantly taught reflection on in the smooth membrane of the glass can bring you to the point of painfully excessive and pleasurable excitement. We select the information our senses provide us with, we classify it in our sensory data the folders according to relevance.for most, less relevant and irrelevant  sensory data. We see less than we are capable of seeing. Or to be put it more precisely, we classify the information on the subconscious level and do not process the kindthose that is labeled as irrelevant or uninteresting.

So what is Klarica doing to us? With his photography he brings us into the head-spinning position of  complete information and momentarily hurls into the state of ecstasy that can be experienced for only briefly.a short while.

Pleasant is the way in which Klarica, like a painter,  constructs the depth of his photography by superimposing various textures. Individual layers penetrate the third dimension with the force corresponding to the intensity of sensory stimulation caused by the its surface, theits softness, the suppleness, the longevity of my need to touch the satins, the snow, the damast of the tablecloth… The spaces suggested are relatively shallow and in fact stop within that field of the painter’s planes. Before us is a photograph of a scene which truly had all the dimensionality of this world and Klarica shoots it so it is shallow and sequential like it was constructed. Maybe it is better to say like painter’s because it is constructed regardless of the fact that it belongs to the sphere “of that which was actually before the lens”. Just as all good painters do; they construct the space and perspectives so that they developit develops in two directions and theirwhose balance becomes is the final outcome. Perspective in an image always suggests depth, the non-existent third dimension, but also it confirms, emphasizes and, shows surface and plane,  that is an image as a two-dimensional field.

Why do I feel at ease when Klarica misbehaves like this? When he constructs still lives he builds spatial planes though object placement within the composition; however in photography it is the light, the shadow, the hues, the language of that  one ray which inscribesis inscribing itself into the emulsion that is always the more powerful language. Thus the clear and careful separation of planes ranging from the dark and powerful to the middle with the greatest amount of detail and the fainter and foggier ones actually provides structure for the story. We have to break down each event into sequential scenes so that we would be able to comprehend it and recount it. That is why I feel at such an ease with Klarica’s scenes. They are adapted to my thoughts, they are it is the product of culture in all its forms, be it as regards content, composition, or specifically photography.

For this reason his landscapes as well as still lives often look like real referencesquotes, as photographic replicas of some of the famous painting compositions. But the referencesquotes are false, vacant, and empty referringquoting exclusively to the cultural canon they belong to. And referencing as aquoting as form of communication and longevity is an important part of that cultural canon. ReferencingQuoting is, they say, an explicit recollection of the culture because “it safeguards culture from self-oblivion and self-destruction” ¹.

The Mirror After All

I would like to come back to the mirrors. They are, of course, a sign for an image, for reference, for culture. The mirrors were behind the mannequin when he left me. Therefore those same mirrors were in an earlier still life standing on their own and alone, leaning against one another and reflecting the landscape.

As I was looking at the photographs sequentiallyin sequence the transformation of one scene into the next seemed important as well. Of course this transformation is caused by practical considerations, when a photographer is using objects at hand and then reusing them in his next composition. But since Klaricahe is using the same but differently placed objects he is developing related but transmuted shape-based thoughts. Thanks to repetition we are able to follow the transformation. We will see that the mannequin is absent at this point. We will be able to see what is not in. That which is missing.

In other words we are following the process of transformation as an important element of culture. As Klarica’s design principle. Transformation is also an event, it is a shift that drives the story. In a wide-open landscape lies a nude woman looking at herself in the mirror. Venus! I’m telling it to you as I remember it. I am telling you the story that occurred to me when I looked at Klarica’s Venus.

Parallel plots hint, refer but are also the associative kind, the quote and the one conditioned by the medium of photography which always guarantees only the fact that “this took place”. This nude woman actually lied there and then on that cold morning. Who is she? How long did she lie for? How did the two of them, she and the photographer, get to that location?

That makes the scene very exciting and the carefully constructed composition makes it serene. Balance! The juxtaposition of nature and culture! Of order and entropy! Of me and you! Of the woman and the photographer! The scene is captured as if it was necessary and logical for Venus to lie there and then. As if it is a matter of rudimentarygeneral knowledge. And we all pretend toas if we understand all of Klarica’s hints like associations as they are seem to be considered to be part of rudimentarygeneral knowledge. And they are it is not. He himself does not know and does not want to know about all the series of intimationsassociations a scene produces.

I imagine that the transformation of the real woman into Venus with a mirror took place  right as she got undressed and lied down. This shift from vertical to the horizontal I associate with going from an active to a into passive state. And now it looks to me as if it is precisely there that the shift from the real world into the world of signs and symbols takes place. Yes, she got undressed outdoors just as the one from Manet’s “Breakfast on the Grass” did. A great deal of our cultural canon is anchored in the triangular area between the naked goddess, the nude as the a sign for all that is corporeal and tofor some extent love-relatedthat is amorous, and the real woman who got undressed in the meadow.

Klarica’s goddess has a cup with a toothbrush next to her leg.  She is holding a mirror in her hand but the raised mirror does not reflect her face, as it did in the turbulent times of Renaissance and Baroque, Titian, Velazquez, and Rubens. The relations were clear then and goddesses separate from real female nudes. The painted faces were reflected in the painted mirrors and the storyteller did not intervene in the lives of his characters. Klarica is modern in the way he opens up the field and allows for links to be made on all formal and semantic levels. Like in a dream, all horizontal and vertical layers are being mixed, as are all significations and experiences, design principles and symbolic shapes.

And the mirror held up by Klarica’s goddess reflects only the light!

The Light Story

A window in Prague. The year is 1976. The sky is inflated swollen up like in a Flemish landscape. In the background there is a town, but it  that is not Delft. It is Central Europe, grey tenement architecture dating to the thirties of the 20^th century, just as it is like in Zagreb. It’s winter, the trees are barren. On the windowsill there is a glass of water, and in the water there is one camellia flower…

The city, the glass and the flower take up only one third of the shot; the rest is sky. Klarica is thirty years younger than today. The sky is the light, like the mirror that is held up by Klarica’s goddess; it is not whiteness but light. The story unfolds through a meeting between the strongly symbolic flower in crystal pure water, its upper petals illuminated and the powerful but amorphous sky, which is the pure illumination. This is the light that records the event, the light that notes the story on the photosensitive surface.

A glass filled with water is a superb sign. It allows some rays to seep through it, it breaks and reflects others. It contains transparency that is visible. It produces whiteness that enters into harmony with other white areas in the photograph, and with the greatest whiteness, that of the sky. All of the whiteness on the photograph is produced on horizontal surfaces. Reflections of water in the glass, reflections on the coaster, reflections on top surfaces of the street lamps and the white reflex from the roof of a distant building. That is the horizontal plane. It is time, the time of reflection. At the level of Klarica’s light story, that reflex plane is metonymy of light. The sky is the vertical plane. It is the space and the metaphor for of light.

And truly the greatest dramatic turning-point in Klarica’s light story happens when she walks out onto the stage, the queen, the seductress, she, the photography. At that moment we realize finally that we have a photograph before us! Then we realize that all stories recorded by photography always tell the same story about light. An open field, interference of signs and their associative lines extends from glasses, birds, fabrics and nude women to the other level told with the language of the medium.

So the film is over, the screen gone black. But there is that one shot following the last when it all falls into place. That one is without and has an explanation. An arm that emerges, a the look of the concealed eyes telling us that things are not quite that simple. Because, this is not fiction.

¹ Dubravka Oraić, «Quoting – explicit intertextuality » u Intertekstualnost - intermedijalnost, ¸zavod za znanost o književnosti, Zagreb, 1988., str. 155