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| SEEKING A BALANCE BETWEEN FORM AND CONTENT Alise Tīfentāle Photography belongs to the realm of art, since it concerns the image and questions of composition, light and shade, etc. At the same time, it's a very fine blend of optics, physics, chemistry, etc. Does an artistically valuable photograph come about only when a high level of technical knowledge is combined in one individual with an education in art (or at least natural artistic talent)? Or is it sufficient to have a perfect understanding of the technical side of photography? Or perhaps the secret of an outstanding work of art should not be sought in the traditional qualities of a "good photograph"? | |
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Thus, we have a question that's always been important for art: the balance between content and form. An answer to this question may be sought in the photographs of Inta Ruka, since they evidently possess this kind of balance. They are recognised as a standard of quality by specialists in the technical and formal qualities of photography, while their human content - ethnographic studies on people in the late 20th and early 21st century - permit them to be viewed in the wider context of documentary photography. This is evident from two exhibitions that opened in 2006: Inta Ruka's solo exhibition "People I happened to meet" at the Photography Centre Istanbul, and her contribution to the exhibition "In the face of history: European photographers in the 20th century" at London's Barbican Centre.
Inta Ruka's solo exhibition "People I happened to meet" (14 September - 11 November 2006) at the Photography Centre Istanbul (Istanbul Fotograf Merkezi) included photo-graphs from the series "My country people" and "People I happened to meet", as well as 14 works from the collection "No. 5 Amēlijas iela", begun in 2004 and not yet shown in Latvia. The Photography Centre Istanbul specialises in black and white photography or, to be precise, black and white photography as a refined technical activity. The centre provides training in the finer points of the black and white photographic process, as well as various time- and labour-consuming alternative processes of photography. Valued above all else at this centre is photography as an object, bringing to the forefront aesthetic values and the visual message - all that the viewer is told by means of halftones, contrasts, chiaroscuro and other means of expression. The content is secondary. The founder and head of the centre, Mehmet Kismet, selects for exhibition work by those photographers in whose pictures one can appreciate all the technical refinement that can be present in black and white photography. The works of Inta Ruka evidently correspond to the ideals of Mehmet Kismet and his longing for "perfect black and white photography". Judging from conversations with Kismet in Turkey, many people (at least in cultural circles) consider Latvians as Westerners, bearers of the positive values of the Western world, and look up to us in some way... In the Western theoretical setting, the topical pictures, motifs and points of reference are quite the opposite, and here photography is not judged according to its outward appearance, seeking its content instead, and finally starting to take seriously the documentary photography created in Eastern Europe. The exhibition "In the Face of History: European Photographers in the 20th Century" at the Barbican Centre (13 October 2006 - 28 January 2007), with works by documentary photographers chosen by curators Kate Bush and Mark Sladen, tells yet another version of 20th century history. Among countless other attempts to bring together the events of the century and imbue them with some kind of linear meaning, this exhibition differs significantly in that it includes many works by photographers from Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Moreover, they are included not as curiosities or exotic departures from the norm, but as full-fledged tellers of the great story, together forming a structured, theoretically argumented view of the 20th century. And this is something that has hitherto not been characteristic of exhibitions at such a scale, and of those thick, heavy thematic albums of photos that pretend to a complete picture of 20th century photography. The curators have put together an exhibition from work by such Western classics as Robert Doisneau (1912-1994), Brassaï (1899-1984), Eugène Atget (1857-1927) and André Kertész (1894-1985), while also seriously presenting Scandinavian photographers (who also most commonly tend to be set apart from the rest of Europe and lumped under such concepts as "Nordic", etc.) and photographers from Eastern Europe: S. I. Witkiewicz (Polish, 1885-1939), Josef Sudek (Czech, 1896-1976), Viktor Kolár (Czech, born 1941), Jitka Hanzlová (Czech, born 1958), Boris Mikhailov (born 1938 in Ukraine), Henryk Ross (Polish, 1910-1991) and the Latvian Inta Ruka (born 1958). The exhibition is chronologically arranged. Inta Ruka's works from the series "My country people" are included in the section "East and West: the Cold War / 1945-1989". In contrast to the politicised titles of the sections, the works chosen are witnesses to human drama and intimate experiences, rather than manifestos of ideological conflict, although there is undeniably an emphasis on social issues. This is evident, for example, from the justification presented in the exhibition catalogue for the inclusion of Inta Ruka's work: "Through looking at these pictures, and reading the descriptive captions that accompany them, we learn about the region and its people. Balvi is close to the Russian border, and a number of Ruka's subjects are of Russian descent. The region has a rural economy, and we see the harvest and the midsummer celebrations. As the 1980s give way to the 1990s we also become aware of the dismantling of the communist system. However, the real emphasis is on the individual subjects, whose stories range from the sufferings of the Stalinist era to the intricacies of village gossip." However, the annotations for the photographs, where the author provides a textual insight into the life of the portraited individuals, thus enhancing the research function of the visual information, have also given rise to criticism. "Inta Ruka gives her intimate photographs of rural life in Latvia long, descriptive titles, but one is never certain what is true and what the photographer has invented," writes art critic Adrian Searle in the British newspaper "The Guardian" (Searle A. Out of Sight // The Guardian, 2006, October 24). Also placed together in the same section are works by Boris Mikhailov, and the visual study by Swedish photographer Sune Jonsson (born 1930) of everyday life in a distant village of northern Sweden in the late 1950s, along with a series of photographs by the German Michael Schmidt (born 1945) on the theme of the Berlin Wall. Questions of the relationship between the individual and society are addressed by Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm's (1918-2002) dramatic story about the transsexual community in Paris in the 1960s, and by the work, similar in content, by his pupil Anders Petersen (born 1944), who presents the regulars at a bar in Hamburg's Reperbahn in the 1960s. Just as full of contrast is the message of the exhibition as a whole: truly existential moments from both World Wars are placed almost side by side with lacklustre, apathetic scenes of everyday life and of the activities of urbanites who, out of boredom and prosperity, have no more meaningful aim in life than a sex change operation. The author is most grateful to the State Culture Capital Foundation for the opportunity to visit the exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London and the Photography Centre Istanbul. | |
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