V E B A H O O D

FOFA Gallery vitrine

If you are in Montreal and find yourself passing by Concordia University Fine Arts building you can stop by FOFA gallery where two of my prints are exhibited in the gallery vitrines (shown above). If curious further, step inside the gallery and you can check my book Shiver which is on display.

Images in the book are from Russia, Norway and Canada though some ancient portraits from Sarajevo make appearance. You can see the preview here, but flipping through the whole thing is a very different thing, for better or for worst.

The exhibition, which is a group show of work by Concordia’s graduating students, is on until the end of June. Please leave a comment here if you happen to check it out.

Montreal, 2008 © Velibor Božović

Simply, I miss street photography. You don’t need to read further then that first sentence.

For quite some time now, street photography has been excluded from the commercial galleries and all other established ways of art dissemination. On rare occasion, we get the opportunity to see some in museums but only from the masters of 4, 5, 6 decades ago (though I can’t remember the last time we even had that opportunity here in Montreal). In art schools, it seems, an attempt  to do a street photography project would make you fail the class, though I can’t confirm that with certainty since the last time a student dared to try was some 15 years ago.

The art and publishing world are interested only in photographs of preconceived ideas. Which is fine, screw them. But, could it be that in this age, with everyone being a photographer and with Google street view and security cameras everywhere and cameras in the sky, the life in our cities will remain undocumented? Perhaps not, there are many fine street photographers doing what they like to do, but I would be interested to know when is the last time a museum acquired a body of work from a contemporary street photographer.

Some future researchers interested in the subject, 30, 50, 100 years from now, will look in vain into a museum’s archives. There, they will find no photographs that show the life on our streets in a few decades at the beginning of 21st Century. But than, 50 years from now, there might be no museums either.

Havana, 2007 © Velibor Božović

No Cuba in the news today.

Matapédia, 2011 © Velibor Božović

Matapédia is a small village located where the river with the same name flows into the Restigouche river, where Quebec and New Brunswick meet.

Last night, at the local train station, I was the only, lonely, passenger  waiting for the train that would take me back to Montréal. Inside I met Claude, the station master, who checked my ticket and took care of my luggage. With my bags on a cart parked on the station platform, I was imagining the map of the world and my current, odd, place on it . Once that train, which started its journey in Halifax, emerged from the dark and I boarded, I had to face sleeping crowd. Though there was some comfort in being surrounded by people, somehow I longed for my empty platform, the dark, and the absence of everything.