a face robber
Going out in the street is a barbaric raid on other person’s privacy: I go by shooting, steeling the faces of passer-bys, entering their physiognomies as a sniper in the streets of the Balkan towns twenty years ago. I stand at the Tunnel, with the objective unrolled like a horse phallus and victims keep advancing unstoppably. Little rascals are calling me, girls notice objective and quickly set up a smile, a hair and cloths.
A young man carrying a child is not aware that sadness from the eyes stays petrified on the screen of digital camera. A big black back is approaching, another big black back; you place them in cadres and manipulate. A girl with her face covered in black veil, with her eyes encircled with violet crayon: I say big eyes for they are the deepest abyss that you can look closely at. Then you take a photo of a ruin near luxurious hotel and provoke a rage of passer- bys: Do not touch the soul of the city, shoot at us, we can endure everything! A young man with an old look in his eyes passes by and hisses: Fuck off, photographer!
voyerism
A deep blue eye is a flash which you froze. You open it at computer screen and enlarge it. It gets deep, it gets cold. You look at it closely and you drown in it. A photo does not only hold an image of what was shot but also of the one who shot it. His reflection is always in the other one, in particular when we speak about photos of the faces. But, it is not the same thing whether you shoot the faces who want it, in the studio and under the lights, or the faces of passer-bys in the streets. And only in the latter case you intrude privacy and innermost feelings, you peek through a key-hole: you have no alibi for voyerism…
It is unbelievable how we are easy on raiding someone’s private space, privacy of complete strangers while at the same time we are confident that our privacy is reserved for us only, spared from any diversion.
Branko Čegec
Translated by Ana Sviličić