Pictures for Anna

When my sister got pregnant, i decided to make a present for her and her future son. “Pictures for Anna” series tells a story of growing up and wholeness of the self. I use my sister’s photographs that she has taken with her mobile phone. I put resized versions of the images into original size photographs. By doing so, i uncover a hidden motif in each image. The resulted image reveals some sort of a pattern, inherent to each original photograph. By decoding the view of my sister, i explore similarity of our view through composition, chosen objects and states, depicted in the photographs. I also contribute to the pictures through method that helps to get qualitatively new type of image that still keeps originality of the initial photo. Photography in this case is a tool for intimate, hyper personal communication and is used for a dialogue between relatives. Through this experimental series i reflect on a format of phone photography which is basically not appropriate for anything except social media and messengers. What interests me in the work most of all is that my sister’s images remind me my own photographs, and the photographs of my grandfather. I perceive these images party as mine or as something very familiar. Photography is ubiquitous, global and utilitarian in modern world and because of that the value of images has strongly decreased as photography is available for everyone who has phone. But if availability is what photography as an essence, technology and a medium was seeking for on all the way of its existence, then the value of it now is that everyone is free to choose what kind of images to live with. Simply, everyone is able to photograph whatever he/she likes and depict a reality where he/she lives and that interests him/her personally. Also, everyone is able to make any kind of narrative with their lives. Photography as an essence is watching everyone’s lives and everyone is being reflected in a mirrorless camera of a phone. The hidden story behind the image uncovers as a hyper personal message to self, almost unconscious, a moment of pure fixation of the reality ‘for oneself’ or possible virtual companion. This project is dedicated and addressed to Tyler, a son of my sister that will be born soon and will live in totally different world when he grow up, that the world we are living in right now and who will have different questions and tasks, given to his generation by the future. When he grow up this work will be archaic, but anyway in our time, when he still is not born, on the doorstep of a new technological revolution in the world of global communications i do this work as a present for him and his mother as a remind of wholeness, naturalness and a freedom of vision that are available to everybody in this world. Though, i think it can change or take some other form and transform into something else or also can be lost, forgotten or prohibited.