– Photographs by Ivan Blažev “Macedonia Dreaming”–
#1 Photographing is rather a moment of approaching than approaching the moment. The distance between the lens and the object leads the photographer to the field of the objectivity of the picture taken from a life organized according to the laws of certainty. The love for the fate (amor fati) of the people that become part of the controlled photo-landscape of the fleetingness, determines their natural features and the emotional diversity. Their clean faces and bodies moving towards the static heavenly, water and earthly depths draw the coordinates of the spatial and traditionalistic belonging.
#2 When we hold in our hands the museum photographs with historical-documentary values we almost always have the feeling that we have covered with our finger the most important part. We look for the point of continuity and discontinuity, forgetting the tradition of intimacy of the persons and objects framed in the composition. The photography of Ivan Blažev opens the questions of the dynamic / repetition of the day through the decomposition of the system of rational necessities and social contexts. His eye restores the intimate mythological layers on the wall of historical narrations. What distinguishes the intimate story from the historical one is – the silence – and the quietness of its significance. This silence can not be expressed through colors, same as the voice, it’s invisible and inseparable from the picture since the moment of its placement inside the womb of the camera.
#3 The photograph cleared of the dark socio-ideological chambers is released of any necessity and predictions. It does not include simple transposition of the ambience, nor hints of extended spaces and movements, of stolen states of the reality… There is no transcendental omnipresence, nor urges for being different, for gentle revolutions or broken narrations. Every memory is incomplete and this is the only reason it is memory at all. The photography is a reminiscence/encounter with a tendency for completeness and reorganization, for sorting and modeling the fragments that would mark the presence of the initial repetition.
#4 In the dream, the fragment faces its perfection and shapelessness in relation to the forms it represents. To dream over alienated pictures is to build a temporary home through reconstruction of the space of the life game, to search for the overlapping the arbitrary boundaries of alertness with the ones of the sight. When the mind dreams, the sight sleeps – when someone talks in his dream, those around him are silent. It is in that interspace of perceptive awareness that the pictures of the inner truthfulness are being born. Dreaming while moving is the reality of our static alertness only. The visualization of someone’s dream can happen with a simple taking over a moment from someone else’s reality. #5 The digital technology has removed the glued eye from the camera. This is an age of distancing and mythical testimonies. The distances from the eye of the photographer to the camera and from the eye of the viewer to the photograph exist to reveal the closeness of the focused with the limited, and the intimate with the unlimited.
#6 The photographer travels so that he does not forget, and takes photographs so that he can remember. Ivan Blažev still keeps his eye glued to the camera, joining his own certain presence with the unpredictable arrangement of the elements in the space. On the territory drafted on the map of the usual, his photographs with their sharp angles cut off the gone by, drawing blood from the memories. What is missing between the circular lens and the rectangular form of the photography are those particular peripheral centimeters that belong to the coated memories of the dream.
Translated by: Maja Hadžimitrova – Ivanova