Sandra Križić Roban on work of Sofijasilvia

We are often unaware of the extent that relations noticeable in certain spaces are affected by the media, and of their beauty and meaning that we miss. By ourselves, we are not capable of discerning the particular, of concentrating the gaze upon what is around us, what we see and feel; for we are determined by the flickering movable image field that mediates different sensations, obstructing the understanding of the event, reconstructing the seen and experienced.

Although two-dimensional, the photograph reminds us, sometimes in incredible and sometimes in exciting ways, of the world’s multiple dimensions. Barthes considered we can ‘but erase it by our gaze,’¹ developing a thesis by M. Blanchot that the ‘essence of the photograph us that it is completely out there, without intimacy, and it is still more unavailable and secretive that the thought, without meaning (even though it refers to the depth of any possible sense), undiscovered, and yet apparent, simultaneously both present and absent.’²

We encounter similar uncertainty of meaning in the works by SofijaSilvia (Silvia Potočki), which confirm the thesis of French theorists regarding the simultaneous and obvious existence of presence and absence. We discern urban frames in her images that intrigue by their vacancy, sights apparently devoid of meaning, that are simultaneously filled with the experience gained through looking.

Early works by SofijaSilvia are determined by the existentialist discourse. Starting from herself and her position in the world, the author continued researching her immediate surroundings using the procedure of compressing them by placid elongated gaze, continuously cutting the scenes she saw through the window or from a terrace. The cycle of Camera Obscura II from 2001 - light-boxes in which photographs have been realized through the camera obscura technique (or, more accurately, diapositive films of medium format and characteristic elongated take) – is immediately conditioned by directing the gaze outside; these are long takes that do not allow one-look perusal, panoramic cuttings of the city. By compressing the experience of duration (the works, on account of the camera obscura technique, depend on the flow, duration and intensity of light), she started shooting photographs that portray something, while a portion eludes, and appears unspoken.

The trajectory of her gaze is common, quotidian: ceramic bowls with flowers on a terrace, a string of chimneys and antennas from nearby roofs, that disappear diagonally below an imagined horizon. The panorama made of tent-like roofs has to thank the late afternoon sunlight for the peculiarity of their identity, which produces that characteristic gilded shine. SofijaSilvia ‘directed’ the camera obscura on one occasion, so it seems, to the only painted balcony in the neighbourhood, which offered the curious and never tiring eye a scene of some foreseen event. The works from the series of Camera Obscura II are dedicated to the still but dependent on movement; they are the measure of photographic ‘know-how’ which tries to establish a certain order in the endless disorder of objects (paraphrasing Barthes).

The series entitled Box   boxed (2001-2005) is composed of photographs set in pairs, framed in dark cloth. The pairs changed places in time, following instinct it seems, indicating the changes in her thinking and the relations towards own work depending on experience and the need to interlink the places (and sever the links all the same). In this series, the mutual distance between the scenes is visible, which is in accordance with the distance the artist consciously retains, striving to fully master the shot, while simultaneously managing to preserve the atmosphere she is almost imperceptibly looking at.

Two characteristic viewpoints in Silvia’s works – one elevated and the other level – come about from movement and retaining the already mentioned distance. In the Child’s Perspective series (2000-2006), a change occurs; the scenes’ multi-faceted appearances come from the specific viewpoint the artist uses to simulate movement and the child’s gaze. To a certain extent, the short duration of attention as one of the peculiarities of the child’s way of seeing is achieved, while we can interpret stringing several shots into a single composition, apart from interrupted attention and the requirement of returning the gaze, as a derivation of the kind from the movie shot, that Silvia replaces with photographic scenes. The whole series appears like an attempt to master the seen and viewed, ‘as if it were for the first time,’ for it is anyway not the people but ‘the places that recall the event’ (J. Joyce).

We also encounter the overpowering sensation of the unspoken in the works from the latest cycle of Common Outlands from 2008, where individual shots and series of photographs recorded in nature have been combined with urban scenes. Rendered vacant, recorded in some unusual time of day, with shadows that do not overly describe, these scenes of London are simultaneously common and specific locations; these function following the principle of a recording of experience and remembrance. However, these are not diaries in the classic sense, for we cannot recognize personal details in the scenes. The scenes are seemingly vacant: in the foreground, the pointed parts of the metal fence stoically retain the photographer’s (and the spectator’s) position at a ‘safe’ distance from the scene observed – Battersea Power Station. The dimmed light is on the background surfaces of the spikes we do not see; we can but notice the restrained side influx of light on the narrow edge. The fascinating power station facility dominates the distant plan, but the parts the gaze reaches further through create intrigue, onwards to the open space filled with low, dense clouds. While urban scenes are noticeable even in the earlier series of boxed – like the only painted balcony in the neighbourhood, that offers the curious and never tiring eye a scene of some foreseen event – the interest in new works is limited to recording the personal experience and the events in the sense of existence in particular space and time.

Silvia Potočki’s photographs have a peculiar characteristic of drawing the spectator ‘from the real world into an unreal world; a world which one does not exactly know how it is constituted but which one senses that it is there.’³ Something is shown and simultaneously proven on them; a part remains elusive, remains unspoken. According to Barthes, the photographs are anyway not what we see, it is ‘but’ evaporative testimony of the disappearance of reality when ‘the image is no longer given the time to become an image.’⁴ A feeling of uncertainty results from this lack of time enough, also the conviction of the need to retain the consciousness of the seen. For the issue is what the next gaze brings.

¹ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: A Note on Photography [translated by Željka Čorak], Antibarbarus, Zagreb, 2003, 131.

² Barthes, ibid., 131.

³ Christian Scholz, ‘ “But the Written Word Is Not a True Document”: A Conversation with W. G. Sebald on Literature and Photography’, in: Lise Patt (ed.), Searching for Sebald. Photography after W. G. Sebald, The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles, 2007, 105.

⁴ Jean Baudrillard, Photography, Or The Writing Of Light, Ctheory, 2000. [www.ctheory.net]