Writing on the wall
Montréal, 2001 © Velibor Božović
Some years ago I stumbled upon an event, here in Montréal; still not sure if it was an art performance or I was early for the exhibition opening and things were still getting finalized, but there was a person working on a large text on the wall. I only stayed for a few minutes and snapped just one photograph.
To this day, I often wonder where the text comes from. Mention Red Army, Berlin and smoking mother in the same paragraph and I become curious. Anyone?
Landscape
Laurentians, 2009 © Velibor Božović
Sometimes it speaks to me but I do not understand it’s language. It is like hearing a beautiful song in a mysterious tongue, a frustrating thrill.
The Radetzky March
The Radetzky March, Montréal, 2002 © Velibor Božović
“Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.”
from the opening paragraph of The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
“Art world” welcomes an “emerging” “artist” or Battle of quotation marks
Montréal, 2002 © Velibor Božović
Among empty graves
Jewish Cemetery, Chisinau, Moldova, 2003 © Velibor Božović
“It was a beautiful sunny day; there was a pleasant whiff of summer abundance in the bright air; birds were deliriously atwitter. We walked down a narrow path into a vault of greenness and quietude, the light diffused by overleafed trees. The path forked and dead-ended and widened; we wandered inward, deeper and deeper. Some of the gravestones were swallowed by the baroque bushes and ivy; some of them were ruins;
…
Some part of my life ended there, among those empty graves; it was then that I started mourning. I can tell you that now, now that there is little but mourning.”
from The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
Jewish Cemetery, Chisinau, Moldova, 2003 © Velibor Božović
Already 6 years have passed since Hemon and I traveled Eastern Europe searching and researching for The Lazarus Project and i still find negatives that I completely overlooked in the first ‘elimination’ round. But Sasha, somehow, kept images in his memory, and, years later, wrote about them.
Ghost photographer
Montréal, 2009 © Velibor Božović
My memory doesn’t serve me well. But, when looking over my contact sheets I can almost always recall the situation when I made the exposure, even if it’d happened years ago.
Few days ago I developed a few rolls of film that I shot earlier this year. The image above was a lonely one in the middle of the contact sheet and I can’t remember anything about it. Nothing prior or after this image gives any clues, as if a ghost photographer accompanied me on that day.
With my own eyes instead
No image © by Velibor Božović
It’s been a terribly long time since I traveled away from home without bringing my camera(s) and photographing everything that caught my eye. Not that there is everything wrong with taking photographs while traveling, it’s what I do with passion, but it seems I had to rediscover the feeling of looking at the world with my own eyes rather then framing it through the viewfinder.
This summer my family made two trips and I routinely packed my equipment, only upon return to realize I did not make a single frame, not even once I pulled my camera from the bag and carried it with me. During our walks my hands were free to rest in my pockets, or around my wife’s shoulder, or my children’s. My eyes were busy as always, but the range was infinite, the frame size was as big as my field of vision. There is no film or pixels, only the memory and when it dies, it is gone forever.
