Painting pushed photography into the world of art

Photography was created in the first half of the XNUMXth century and since then things have not been the same in the fine arts. It influenced fine art, and fine art in different stages influenced the development of photography, the art historian said. Lily Karadzic during the third session of the "Imaginarium", a new project of the "Zahumlje" JU.

About the relationship between photography and image, their points of contact, but also passing by, about when photography became an art form and when it became a powerful tool of manipulation and deception, about its journey from an obscure camera to IT technology, with Ljiljana Karadžić and Ancom Gardašević, an artist, the art historian and author of the project spoke Kristina Radovic.

Karadžić, whose sphere of interest is the intertwining of photography as a medium and other disciplines, says that photography helped artists at the very beginning and shortened their path, in the craft sense, but also influenced their expression, like the futurists who were fascinated by the power of photography to evoke movement.

"It had a special role in breaking down the image as an organic whole, as we had observed it until then, which was on one side of reality, and we live on the other. Photography helped photomontage, it becomes a fragment of reality, and in cubist collages we have a collision between our reality and that work's reality, which somehow becomes open and infected," said Karadzic.

Photography also served the Dadaists, the Russian Constructivists, and the Surrealists. The great use of photography in the realization of the image reached its culmination with the hyperrealists, Karadžić adds, for whom photography served as a template. By creating huge pictures dominated by a large frame of urban elements, works are created in which it is difficult to draw a line between reality and abstraction, but which, due to the absence of expression and large dimensions, cause discomfort and amazement in the audience.

Photography, the art historian points out, influenced the liberation of painting from the mimetic, representational.

"With the digital era, photography became available to everyone, hyperproduction took place and today we are surrounded by countless photos that we don't remember. I can say that visual pollution has set in and they are being stored without order, creating confusion in us. However, photography has also become a powerful means of manipulation in different spheres of life and in a way a place of deception," said Karadzic.

Anka Gardašević says that photography, which for a long time was represented as a carrier of information, enters the real artistic door through conceptual art and becomes an equal tool in the function of art, and found all its elements of stable artistic expression in fine art, especially in painting. She reminded me of the "Magnum" agency, which was created after the Second World War and was one of the main centers of life photography. Photography, as well as film, she adds, because of the new type of framing, bring a new way of looking at painting, bringing freedom in expression.

"Photography allows us to extract from one frame many other sequences that can be a kind of minimalism," she said, pointing out that for more than a century, photographs and paintings have been directed at each other.

At the beginning of postmodernism, photography and painting began to correspond with new high-tech media, creating a different multimedia environment in which traditional connections and boundaries between these arts were revised, and the digital age brought faster access to art. Gardašević also shows with his works how photography and art are intertwined.

"Sculpture helped me to look at photography in a different way, and scenography to use it as a tool in my work", said the artist who, with the recent exhibition "The Reality of Memories", told the story of creation and disappearance and that life is like a flash - a moment that it disappears quickly.

"I don't know if art is more powerful than reality. Life often suppresses it, but it is more permanent than reality. She is what remains. If you are overwhelmed by the flash of a work of art of any kind of art, it means that it still has power, because it lifts us above the gray everyday life", said Ljiljana Karadžić.

And the picture is there to "help" that flash, but also us. Kristina Radović, editor of the program in "Zahumlje", with her "Imaginarium" offers the audience the opportunity to create the imagination of the real and conjure images and worlds known only to us.