Tocka

Ivan Blazev - Friends
exhibition of photographies

...from Iskra Geshoska review

Timeless (auto)biography

The Archeology of the Other always opens the gate towards the visibility of the Self. The haystacks laid on the plows of the Self always peers through the furrows of the Other. And every man and woman, consciously or not, is in a permanent quest for the parameters, which could be a possible road sign about the reflections which illuminates us in relation to the Others. One such parameter is the photographic concept of Ivan Blazev, who, leading us through the world of one of the most subtle intimate categories, gives us a chance to better see ourselves as someone else.

The journey through the secrets only peering through Blazev lenses is a complex route which the unconscious confronts to the habit of rationalization and verbalization. Lyrical and opened, but also subversively narrated story about a time that lasts even after the framing in the photography, after the exit from the camera obscura, after the closing of the lenses and for a space more inner than anything else.

We are challenged with strong visual identity game, which clearly suggests that identity is always fluid, nomadic. Blazev illumination creates a world of identities resembling a maze. One should not look for the answer to the puzzle in the middle of the maze but for it’s own Aryadne, who ravels and unravels the identity woven, something that exists only in relation.

What is exciting and what activates all the senses in the “politics” of Blazev photographic “friendships” is the complexity and polyvalence: behind the images identical on the photographed object there are other images, settled in the memories and in the photographer anticipations. All these layers rush in more or less familiar or unfamiliar directions, feeding with the trembling of the relation author – friend – identity – Self – Other – objective – subject – object. So, Blazev story gets the miraculous power of life who settles, divides into layers, constructs and deconstructs, as a mighty entity which relativizes the photographically fixed categories of time and space. Simply it leaves trace of lasting. And we, as recipients, are caught in a net of reflections, self-reflections and illuminations, of experienced, interpreted and still unacknowledged faces.

Investigating the Self in the strong subjective relation, Blazev releases his photos from the domination of the author presence: he leaves the voices of Otherness(es) to echo through his visual text. Thus, he actualizes the apparition of "non-centrality" of the Self in the process of creative reflection. From the other side what is at stake is unique introspective method: The Self exists as "a supplementary organ" of the Other, as a fragment of the Other - it attaches to the collective memory, sometimes built in the common time-space with the other. Blazev creates complex identitarian process of reflection and reading of the Self through the Other and vice versa. The photographic friendly world which is shown suggests that the interpretation and marking of identity is permanent over passing of the boundaries of the identitarian territory of the Other and of her/himself, of Other within her/himself, or of her/himself in the Other, or...

The photographic narration of Blazev shows that he is master to create what Roland Barthes would call "a blind field" or punctum. It means that although the focus of the lenses is apparently on the subject, yet the subject itself is not the central object. Blazev leads the spectator out of the frame, out of the visible thus giving him the chance to become the one who revitalizes the frozen photographic moment. Simply, Blazev photos are interactive process with no datum and location, where the story develops permanently and flows in the most unexpected directions...

And after all, is there any subversion in Blazev lyrical discourse? There is. Since, as Barthes puts it, the photography is subversive not when it horrifies, stigmatize or attacks the senses, but when it is reflective, silent and contemplative. This is exactly the photographic world of Blazev: longing for silent, non-verbal exchange. It teaches us how to feel the speech of silence especially in our loud and empty time. Sailing through his photographic adventure we have opportunity to reveal the reality for ourselves in the electricity of the silence created in the conversation of his friends.

Iskra Geshoska