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July 23rd – August 8th
Photography today more than ever has a breakthrough in all spheres of social life, bringing radical change to the collective experience of the surrounding world. Accelerated technological development, numerous innovations in the field of digital and telecommunication devices equipped with cameras, together with their growing mass usage turned photography into the dominant cultural practice and an inevitable aspect of our everyday lives. The occurrence of social networks, especially Instagram, will mark perhaps the final phase of democratization of the photographic medium, integrating it almost entirely into the everyday types of interpersonal and broader social communications and interactions. The ability to make a photo every day, to repeat the shot as many times as you want, then edit it at your sole discretion and share it in a second with hundreds or thousands of other people, opened up a new, exciting chapter in documentary photography, thoroughly redefining its values, implications and significance. By now, an unperceivable number of private photos daily published and distributed via social networks have become the subject of profound analysis and research, such as the project Phototrails*, a study of thirteen global metropolises, initiated with the aim to question the ways in which different and circulating visual information (in this case, 2.3 million Instagram photos) could summarize and anticipate a complex image of dynamics, structures, intensity of events as well as social and cultural specificities of a certain urban environment. Marko Stojanović’s exhibition “The City. Any.” has in its focus exactly this drastically changed experience of today’s world, the everyday life of cityscapes and their visual representations. A series of photos made in Belgrade and during his travels connect the author’s unique sights into a story, not only about the constantly transforming character of the urban, but also about its identity recognitions and readings amongst the infinity
of possible individual/personal perceptions and impressions. Made on the go, often with a mobile phone camera and primarily designed for the virtual sphere, Marko’s immediate visual reflections map and reveal a city to be a place of permanent unpredictability of relations between past and present, connections and intersections of many (in)visible layers and traces of our daily existence, movement, communication, exchange, routine and habits. The author astutely observes and captures them in details, fragments, shapes, perspectives, spontaneous bonds of nature and architecture, in extremely ordinary but yet surprising vivacity of urban everyday life. Now transposed into a printed medium and relocated into a different presentational frame, Stojanović’s photos once again point out the strength and uniqueness of the author’s vision of cityscapes and narratives, reflecting the entire complexity of sensual impressions and relations that we establish in contact with reality and the physical world.
Text: Miroslav Karić
Photo: Marko Stojanović