Branka Slijepcevic on work of Boris Cvjetanović

The author Boris Cvjetanović, born in Zagreb in 1953 and undoubtedly one of the most distinctive phenomena in Croatian photography of recent decades is, through a combination of circumstances, best known to the general public by a section of his opus which could be described as tranquil and ultimately - why shy away from the word - beautiful. It is a cycle which the author himself claims was created in times of leisure, and one which is still open-ended. The cycle emerges, depending on the time of its creation, under different titles: Summer holiday, Scenes without significance, or under the simple and self-effacing title, Photographed.

To a degree, the thematic circles of this part of his opus fall into the category of a diary. The author records scenes from his holidays, taking shots of his friends, relatives, his wife and his daughter, Buga - most often in Nerežišće, on the island of Brač, but also in other locations. However, in this case, “leisure time” does not include the adventure of uncovering the unknown, the strange, the exciting or the deliberately sought after. What we do see is a family home, Mediterranean courtyards, a kitchen where objects last enduringly in their traditional places, a room whose arrangement never changes, a view of the sea from a terrace, nature never shown in its virginal wildness but always tamed, as in the medieval Gardens of the Holy Virgin.

One after another is a succession of scenes of carefully planted flower pots, washing drying in the wind, family lunches seen from a window and devoid of any “photographic” picturesqueness, interiors with lovingly chosen objects - a vase, or a candle on starched lace doilies, all oddly intimate, captured as a kind of indirect and nonrhetorical homage to anti-design, to a particular kind of beauty that only the host regards as beauty and adornment.

It is a fact, however, that Boris Cvjetanović is an author who could also be defined as a classic photographer. And indeed he is one, with regard to the dimension of black-and-white photography which he embraces, with its now forgotten

wealth of tonal gamut set against the galloping greyness of current performances. He is also one in the manner in which he sets the viewing point of an invisible photographer, with no interventions through the angle of viewing and without an aggressive closing in on the scene. And by the fact that he is the sole producer of his works. Thus, the question of beauty in a photograph acquires a deeper dimension time-wise; a question that has held considerable significance since the very beginnings of the medium.

Even if we were to ignore Fox Talbot's patented name of calotype, his conviction that the role of photography is indeed to record scenes of beauty; even if we were to ignore direct statements by many photographs whereby they wish to retain beauty - like for instance that made by Ann Margaret Cameron, and attribute it to a personal approach - it is said she died while looking at a star-filled sky, with a sigh: “Oh, how beautiful!” - it remains indisputable that aestheticization, a certain beautification of reality, is immanent to photography. This aestheticification of motifs could easily be illustrated by, for instance, the perambulations of Antonioni's characters where the Renaissance palace and the jumbled, ugly suburbs acquire much the same visual harmony and beauty.

Needles to say, such an aestheticization immanent to photography canonizes and consumes beauty. Along those lines, one of the questions that could be raised with regard to this part of Cvjetanović's opus is: are Scenes without significance merely and exclusively beautiful? Are they really without significance?

It is in that point that the challenges of a precise definition of the sensibility of this world, and the definition of the meaning of significance, are equally robust.

Melancholic time of leisure

Although the cycle Summer holidays makes no conscious effort to pose any questions, to provoke theoretical sophistry or to roam through the inconsistencies of post-Modernist aesthetics - and is indeed quite radical in its lack of effort, thus reducing its effort down to the selection of an ascetic title: Photographed - the title Scenes without significance is itself an invitation to contextualization.

In other words, it is difficult to escape either the empirical or intellectual impression that whatever the photographer is capturing with his camera does have significance, at least for him, since he is choosing what to photograph. In

fact, in this case it is even more difficult to believe in the declared non-significance, since the crystal vases, laces, carpets, odd looking candles, a bath touched with a ray of sunshine, stoves, windows, a piece of strangely shaped wire on the facade, shoes in front of the entrance door, an old man sitting in an inner Mediterranean-type courtyard and seen from above, chandeliers reflected in a mirror, a blurred television picture upon the clean planes of a cupboard, even a rather baffling fly trap - they all look quite significant in fact.

All in all, the cycle is an involuntary though no less determined polemics with a classic photographic idea about the significant - significant in the sense of the Bressonian moment of decision, a moment of documentaristic pretension

to simply record, be it picturesquely poor, be it famous and exotic, or unknown. Very often in the specifically targeted speck of time.

Difference is not insignificant: in no part of his opus, and particularly not in this one, does Cvjetanović target a specific moment. Quite the contrary, in the scene of leisure he believes in, or at least hopes for, the permanent quality of the photographed.

In the swing between the beautiful and the true, which photographers have been grappling with ever since the earliest days of the medium, from the standpoint that beautiful is also true to the viewpoint that beautiful cannot be true, Cvjetanović has been creating a beautiful cycle in which he rejects the current conventions of beauty, thereby also rejecting the conventionally truthful documentation of anything.

And so, a particular canon of beauty is being created in his opus. There is no uncertainty about it, but in its underlying layer a call of a deep melancholy of the familiar can be heard, like a child's lonely gazing into the micro-cosmos of a home and things close and warm.

It is not without interest to include this opus into a strong current of explicitly touristic photography, testimonies of all the unknown places one has been when not working. It is, of course, a sub-genre but the standards of which are

no less prominent - the result usually being boredom and anxiety. In contrast, Cvjetanović's sophisticated version of the photograph of a time of leisure is vaguely perfect and vaguely melancholic.

Exiles into anxiety

An unprepared spectator, who has only read or heard about other parts of Cvjetanović's opus, they can - at first glance, and even at second glance - come as an unpleasant surprise. Opening up as a counterpoint to the tranquil

melancholy of summer holidays, precious objects, familiar homes, friends and families, is a dark, underlying layer of a whole array of cycles: Mesnička 6; People from the sewers; Scenes from hospitals, lunatic asylums and prisons; Scenes of evictions, Mother in gaol and, finally, Workers - in a gamut ranging from hopeless strikers in the Labin mines to the workers of Munja, and those in Dioz.

In Mesnička 6 Cvjetanović shadows Dragec, a person at the bottom of the urban social structure, a kind of harmless monster not unlike those depicted by Diane Arbus, and he shadows him to his family environment. And laid out before us is a depressing string of photographs of a family dying away in a cellar, amid dirty bed linen, blind, demented, on the other side of hopelessness, convincingly shared even by a dog.

In People from the sewers Cvjetanović follows the homeless, goes into their underground areas, capturing ambiances with deposits of wretched parodies of household things, even decorations.

Probably the most harrowing part of this dark part of Cvjetanović's opus are Hospitals: children without hope, doomed for ever by disease, and dying old people, helpless, victims eerily alone caught in the wringer of institutionalized medicine.

Disturbing photographs of lunatic asylums: psychopaths, alcoholics and drug addicts with their crack-brained and foreboding worlds revealed in the tattoos readily shown, as well as the savage traces of suicide attempts, bring forth the terrifying emotional remoteness of the photographed people.

And to the same circle of these faithful exiles into horror and anxiety belongs the cycle Workers.

The hopeless strikers of the Labin mines are, of course, not a asocial-come-revolutionary record, although they might appear as such. The author follows the miners to their homes - their drama is not only a social one. Perhaps still more fundamental is the fact that they have been so utterly uprooted. Here again we see a play of ambiances, things and clothes. Bleak interiors with phoney, colourful “home” woven cloths and senseless and decaying attributes of domestic decoration mounted high up on a wall and taken to the grotesque: antlers of a deer (swept in by water) decorate the space just as the picture of the president does. Here, drama has begun much earlier than the closure of the mine.

And although one could be led to assume that miners, having come to work, were more or less psychophysically sound, their isolation resembles the the advanced physical and mental otherness of the workers of Dioz. The anxiety and aloneness of a Dioz seamstress at a sewing machine appears somewhat like those we see in the scenes from hospitals.

One could, of course, find reason to deliberate on the individual reasons that led to this dark counterpoint in Cvjetanović's work, but it is a phenomenon quite well known and occurs quite frequently in the history of photography,

Besides, it is probably illustrative to point out that the author did not go out of his way in search of dark themes, they somehow seemed to find him: Dragec asked to be photographed, the hospitals were commissioned - in part, the Labin miners was a professional undertaking. But that in itself gives rise to some other issues, which we shall deal with later on.

And while on the subject of the counterpoint principle of an opus, the list of the classics of photographers who also took “beautiful photographs” and those whose topics were mental, sexual and social underground would be quite long.

The well-known opus by Diane Arbus, an authoress who normally took fashion photographs, also included what she herself, in a surprisingly cold-hearted manner, described as photographing freaks and monsters - be they giants or dwarfs, mongoloids, knife-eaters or hermaphrodites. Her motifs, she explains, are the terrible excitement, admiration of freaks, something that takes one's breath away; she describes herself as somebody who approaches, crawling on her belly and claiming to be certain of the existence of borders, and that only God knows when the troops

will begin to advance and become dangerous.

Picturesque paupers, photographed in a voyeuristic manner in a metro by a camera hidden under a coat, or when posing and ceremonially looking into the camera, or within the socially pretentious projects such as, for instance, Hine's documentation of children's work, or the early American FSA project which was to document “low income groups”, are but a few illustrations of the “safari” impulse to delve into the exotic thematic circles of abject poverty or obscene wealth, immanent to the medium of photography.

In other words, exoticism which involves the standpoint whereby the photographer is photographing something different from himself/herself and his or her own circle of experience, made its appearance in photography very early on, is persistently enduring and ranges from the romantic alibi for visiting other countries and civilizations, to the rather cynically patronising, but nevertheless true, early title by Riis: How the Other Half Lives, “the Others” being the poor of New York.

The ethical pretensions are not rare in that particular genre, the intention to use a picture as drawing attention to the existence of the unfortunate and the deprived. Belief in the usefulness and genuineness of such motifs is undoubtedly a matter of individual evaluation and approach to life in general, which includes the evaluation of this non-belonging, visitor role of a photograph. For instance, the FSA project did, in the end, include a rather diffident proposal that somewhat brighter photographs be shown as well - for instance, housewives picking flowers, while Diane Arbus - her accepted lack of compassion notwithstanding which, incidentally, she does not demand of the spectator either - is in fact demonstrating her fear of and animosity towards her models.

In fact, this photographic safari - just like any other, with the exception of war photography - assumes that this other world is not going to attack, although it is quite dubious the extent to which the photographer him/herself did just that. And this raises an ethical question. Going by the inner logic of a foray into foreign territories, it is not at all unusual for the same photographer to have within his opus picturesque paupers and a variety of misfortunes, as well as the glamorous counterpoint to that - whether be it wealth, fashion or any other form of cold aestheticism. Which once again opens up yet another ethical question.

The said situations typical of the profession in fact contextualize anew Cvjetanović's opus. The significant difference is that Cvjetanović is not a cold, detached visitor to hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons, or an observer of evictions or misery. Nor is he obsessed with it all in the manner Diane Arbus is. He holds no pretensions of an ethical message, as Hine does.

Cvjetanović takes the position of a person facing another person who is in trouble, beset by anxiety or horror. That other person is not typical example, or a class representative, or a monster - but simply an exile in anxiety, a person without a home, without any possessions, indeed without himself or herself. The author's standpoint is: sooner fear than a moral, curiosity-driven or sermonizing fervour.

Hence the significant differences in the lines of counterpoint: Cvjetanović does not counterpoise glamour to anxiety, misery and misfortune - which is often the case in photography. His counterpoint to anxiety is non-designed intimacy and privacy.

Photograph from an ambush

As we have already said, the dark part of Cvjetanović's opus is not the result of captures from an ambush, it is not a posse, or a hunt. The author's view is quite different from the Bressonian, which compares himself to a Zenhunter,

speaks of being like a primed gun ready to take out his prey. It also differs from Araki's, who throws himself into frenzied photographing of Tokyo, claiming that the city gave itself to him; from Avedon's, who takes pleasure in his models coming to him, as dependent on him as they are of their doctor or fortune teller; from the blowup tape of the world in which a photograph revels in the violence of photographing a struggling model, or in humiliating a model who acquiesced in advance.

In fact, the violent character of photography is a lasting first sin of the profession, which early on tested the wits of, for instance, Adams, who attempted to resolve the problem terminologically by suggesting the term make instead of take. Within the frame of this terminology Cvjetanović is an author whose starting point is to make a photograph, not to snatch it, which inevitably involves a certain level of respect for those photographed, an aspect contra-indicated to photography.

Stains and graffiti

And so, it is to this world in which a photographer is no superman, hunter or Conan the Barbarian of camera obscura that Erotic graffiti and Stains found on the city walls quite naturally belong. Virginal and wild landscapes, with a single exception, cannot be found among Cvjetanović’s work. His frame, anyway, is a town, a townlet and a house.

In this case town facades become surfaces upon which the anonymous artist surreptitiously expresses himself. Diversion of an individual appears as graffiti on a wall. Graffiti are usually directed against the dominant political ideas. And dominant institutions wage street wars against street artists. However, graffiti that has been painted over becomes even more intriguing, whether it be due to the fact that its context is spread by word of mouth, or because the written words appear through stain covering it, or because the stain is used as a frame for a new statement. This war is not without a Chaplinesque form of humour.

Erotic graffiti, however, bring the anonymous artist into direct contact with his Palaeolithic and Neolithic colleagues or cults of the Antiquity. In contrast to the sexual taboos and the invasion of design-sexuality through pornography, through his interventions the unknown author transforms a telephone booth into a whore, a post possessed of no awareness of archetypal symbolism he explains away as a powerful phallic symbol, he envisages suggestive erotic visions in carvings of shallow relief. Humour, which is undeniable, probably issues from the initially not readily apparent clarity of visions - and it is with this lack of clarity that anonymous authors resist the convention of a surrogate sex.

Similar humour can be seen in a cycle with no comic tendencies whatsoever, in the series of Shop windows adorned by the solemn image of a deceased leader who, by some twist, sends a message of the eternal character of shop windows replete with food and clothes, and the transient nature of human power.

The coherence of Cvjetanović's world is therefore quite indisputable. However much power, or desire for power, may be immanent to photography - it cannot be found in this opus.

Mirror-imaging and duplexity

However, in this kind of interpretation of Cvjetanović's opus a suggestion could creep in of the undoubtedness, of warm humanness and guileless nature of the work, a characteristic which could by no means be attributed to his opus. The photographs in question have not been produced in some unquestionable world, nor are they a result of some unquestionable view of the world.

Admittedly, the slip-grounds in both the meaning and duplexity are not the primary characteristic of each individual photograph, but neither is it in short supply in the work overall. It even does not take a very careful look at the opus to notice slip-grounds in the genres.

Here, the photographs of summer leisure, a genre as widespread as it is standardized, slide into a private and a very melancholy record - not about the unknown but about the most intimately known. The social photographs of workers do not speak of a type or a class, but of the rootlessness of an individual. Cycles from hospitals are not an ethic appeal, nor are they an exercise in emotional toughness, but an encounter with a very private, chilling, fear. Scenes from a lunatic asylum are not tourism or exoticism, but a record of the fateful loneliness of the other, even of the author himself. Graffiti and Shop windows are not picturesque documents of time found in the street, but an uneven struggle by a private individual against the power of institution.

In other words, Cvjetanović produces photographs of summer - which according to the traditional rules they are not; he makes social photographs which likewise possess no characteristics that would make them such; and then there are those - in the widest sense photographic-come-touristic photographs of hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons - which again are in no way what they seem to be. And it does not hurt to repeat that in this anti-tourism in the world of others he does not juxtapose the usual exoticism of photographic glamour, but his very own, private world - family, home, familiar things, snippets of nature bearing a distinct trace of man.

The only cycle of untouched nature, without any intervention by man, entitled The Ocean, made on the southern cape of Australia, was supposed to - and according to the author it indeed does - evoke the poetry of wild and untouched nature. But whatever the author may think about it, the cycle exudes some primeval anxiety. When all is said and done, Cvjetanović is a photographer of man and of things set within an ambiance.

It would be rather interesting, although it would exceed the boundaries of this text, to make an analysis of his numerous photographs depicting people and things which are not where they should be but which are somewhere where they do not at all belong. Starting with people who do not belong in hospitals, prisons, lunatic asylums and rented accommodation, all the way to the miniatures with displaced objects: armchairs in the streets, shoes in front of entrance doors, handsets stuck high in the wire, abandoned car bodies, carpets slung across cars.

In a wider frame of Cvjetanović's re-interpretation of genres, these photographs reiterate the chronic pattern of “something not being right”, of “something not being in its place”. Hence the vague, uneasy sensations, ranging from restlessness to anxiety.

And so, in the quiet opus of an ostensibly very classic, even classicistic author, there exists an underlying current of baffling unrest and foreboding which, ultimately and highly logically, link the two so very different worlds of Boris Cvjetanović.

In conclusion, just as a careful viewing of his opus reveals that many things which seem to be what they are really not, so the author himself at first glance appears to be what he most certainly is not. In other words, Boris Cvjetanović is neither a tranquil - nor classic, nor conservative photographer - although at first glance a mistake is possible.

The self-denying sensibility and harmonious scenes by Boris Cvjetanović are, ultimately, an expression of an utterly non-classic and non-classicistic world. What we do have is a specific and solid amalgamation of melancholy, doubt and anxiety, permeating the modern world of photography.

First published in the magazine Život umjetnosti no. 64-01