Photos of contradiction speak of love as what gives meaning

A selection from the author's long-term photographic research into the motifs of cemeteries, human existence and transience. Milomir Kovačević, will be presented at the exhibition "Innocent Saints" which will open today in Podgorica, at the Photography Gallery "F 64" at 20 pm.

"The photographs, which feature angels, crucifixes, detached parts of the human body and other fragments of existence, do not view the cemetery exclusively as a place of suffering and mourning, but as a space of memory, contemplation and transcendence. Through a specific relationship to light, long exposure and an analogue photographic process, Kovačević creates photographs of distinct sculpturality and sublimity, but also receptive closeness, in which the boundary between life and death opens up as a space for contemplation of love as that which outlives and gives meaning," he points out. Vesna Danilović in his review of the setting.

She calls him a proven shaman of analog photography and an undisputed magician of the laboratory who, “despite the dramatic changes in life circumstances and surroundings, and perhaps precisely because of them, returns to cemeteries for years, those sanctuaries of human existence and transience,” she notes. She emphasizes that this is not to mark them only as places of suffering and mourning, but to lead them towards oblivion and immortality with the help of his greatest love - photography.

"All his angels, isolated parts of the human body and existence, crucifixes most often with an absent Christ, no matter how surgically sharp or, more often, fluidly filmed, with long exposure and blurred, sometimes resembling unrepeatable photograms or X-ray prints of our existence, always have a solid sculptural quality and sublimity, but also simplicity and receptive closeness," Danilović notes.

She adds that Kovačević speaks in a calm and intimate language, in which he leaves us with the edges of films in his photographs, the light of transitional times of day, scenes elevated in relation to the usual point of observation not to make them unattainable but to create a space for contemplation and transcendence.

“Milomir Kovačević speaks to us in the language of love... 'All these individual expressions of love return to the love that created them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a world of the living and a world of the dead, and the bridge between them is love, the only thing that survives, the only meaning,'” says Danilović.

Milomir Kovačević was born in 1961 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and is considered one of the most significant photographers whose work is marked by contradictions - life and death, past and present, eternity and transience. He began photography at the age of 17 in Sarajevo, and throughout his career he has recorded various segments of social and cultural life, including the everyday life of besieged Sarajevo in the early 1990s. Since 1995, he has lived and worked in Paris, where he continues his photographic and exhibition activities. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the annual award of the CCF Foundation, the French National Order of Merit for photographic work and engagement in the rank of knight, and the 6th of April Award of the City of Sarajevo.

"Kovačević is a photographer of contradiction. He is a photographer of death and life, past and present, eternity and transience. His photographs are both very violent and excessively serious. Their quality lies above all in their pictorial power, far from any stylization, thanks to which he shares his personal history with others," his biography emphasizes.