V E B A H O O D

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.

BiH, 2005 © Velibor Božović

Murmansk, Russia 2010 © Velibor Božović

Recently, on The Online Photographer, I read the story about Voja Mitrovic, the great printer of some great photographers, Cartier-Bresson and Kudelka being most notable. While Voja’s story told is very interesting there is an untold story in there, briefly mentioned, that I keep thinking about: the story about a 1950′s local photographer in Foča, a small town in eastern Bosnia, named Radmilo Mazic.

“Voja was born in Foča, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia, in 1937. His father was killed during the war when he was four years old, and from this early age, he became aware that he would have to work to help his mother and family. He came to photography by accident—his family had a cow, and daily he would deliver a liter of milk to the house of a local photographer named Radmilo Mazic. One day this photographer asked Voja’s mother if her son would like to be his photographic apprentice. In Sept., 1953, Voja began to work as Mazic’ apprentice. Mazic had studied photography at a school in Zagreb with teachers from the Ecole de Graphisme of Vienna.”

I’ve passed through Foča a couple of years back and it was the most depressing little town one can imagine, full of scars from the latest war installment in which some locals enthusiastically killed, raped and send to refuge their Muslim neighbors.  I can only imagine Foča back in the 1950′s, back then even smaller town recovering from the previous war installment that didn’t lack in atrocity either. But in 50′s Foča lived and worked Radmilo Mazic who had studied photography in Zagreb!

I would love to see Mazic’s portraits from the 50′s even more then to hold Voja’s prints, but I don’t believe the archive of his work could possibly survive all this time.

Once I inquired about the archives of another small town photographer to find out that they do not exist. I am pretty sure I will never really know much about Radmilo Mazic and his work and I wonder how many small town photographer’s archives, how many photographed faces, simply disappeared in the last few decades, never to be seen again.

Sarajevo, BiH, 2005 © Velibor Božović

Miroir, 2004 © Raymonde April (with permission)

Last Friday Montreal’s gallery Les Territoires held an interesting event, an artist and curator talk with Raymonde April and Eduardo Ralickas, where the two engaged in a very informative discussion on a nature of collaboration in regards to their project Équivalences 1-4. Of course, as always, the talk went much further into the labyrinth of art related subjects. Some of the teachers/artists from Concordia University and UQAM were there to contribute to the discussion.

The room was full (it is a small room though) and the organizers were, naturally, happy with the number of people in attendance. One question regarding the attendance is still on my mind: how came every photo student in this city did not come to attend? There were about a dozen Concordia students and a handful of UQAM students in the room. For the majority of the rest, was there really anything better to do than to grab the opportunity to listen, and ask questions, and even to offer and test your own opinions, with the top class artist and a curator with whom she collaborated? There is something to be learned from someone who is able to mount 3 different exhibitions simultaneously within the same city.

I hope that the people behind Les Territoires will continue to bring forward artist willing to speak about their work. Also, photography gets much more exciting once it steps out of it’s often claustrophobic world and I hope Les Territoires, and other spaces, will show more of the works where photographers collaborated with people of different vocations (writers, filmmakers, historians etc.); there lies a chance to bring some fresh faces to these events. Certainly, the talk with Raymonde April and Eduardo Ralickas was a right step in that direction. If you missed the talk but still want to see the work, two out of three exhibits can still be seen: in Galerie Donald Browne (until Feb 13th) and in Occurrence until March 6th.