Photographic activity of Ivan Arsenijevic finds its fruitful outset and outcome in multiple relations through which this artist examines, experiences and reflects a city as complex phenomenon. Starting with the project People from Barracks over photographic serial collection Blow- up, up to the newest photographic achievement Some Cities, there are some questions considering the constellation of problems of social nature, urban dynamics and perceptive mechanisms, whereby photography acquires the function of analytical instrument, archival document and contemplative object. In theoretical analysis, from its beginning photography as medium has been observed together with the growth of modern city, perceptive shifts and modifications of people’s life in new circumstances, whereas the act of photographer has been described and philosophically embodied in the figure of the flâneur, city walker and idler closely watching and experiencing the city environment with wide open eyes. Thus, the story of photography is most of the part the story of the city that is to take place non-linearly and appear in fragments like the flash in the street web with bouncing insight.
In each new city Arsenijevic looks for the part necessary for coming closer to more comprehensive insight, often coming back to the location discovered while wandering, and taking photographs in documentary style with no intervention in postproduction. While the photographs of city spaces reflect the enjoyment of freedom of photographer’s own movement embodied in possible contemplative distance, snapshots from subway evoke bodily closeness in spaces of regulated movement and in a new way include the author as a participant in the city life able to record moving on escalator as well as both situations from wagon and platform. In everyday life human faces and body postures in public transport, static but aware they could be observed by the others, are interesting for they always have in mind that they are not just the subject but also the object of observation. That balancing on the edge brings them closer to photographic portrait, or precisely, to those ones who are being photographed. As Roland Barthes says: Once I feel observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing’. I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image[3]. Although people captured in Arsenijevic’s snapshots from subway do not constitute theirselves in the process of posing for photographer – many of them are not even aware of being photographed – it is just that these photographs register the situation of potential exposure to the someone’s other eye in the public places and suggest the moment of the representational and pictorial in everyday life.
Pictorial and spectacular is more directly present in close-ups of shop-windows taken by mobile phone camera. Exposure to the view is here intentional, arranged, meditated and separated by the shop-window glass. Arsenijevic’s decision to record situations with commercials and with selling goods involved by mobile phone camera connected with display gives certain relation to screen culture interweaving the whole city space and enlightening mobility of today’s citizen as well as the flow of new pictorial traffic. This analysis almost relays on situational insight according to which the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images[4]. It is not by chance that Situationists were the ones engaged into research of the city and psychogeography of urban areas testing the possibilities of unconventional act of getting to know city structure and life. Although Ivan Arsenijevic ‘s final outcome is photography as the means of expression, as a form of image dominating in contemporary moment, he achieves it conceptually by opening spaces of reflecting different relations and experiences in the city that come in beyond the image.
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility, Essays, Nolit, Beograd, p.141
[2] Walter Benjamin, On Some motifs in Baudelaire, ibid., p. 213
[3] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Rad, Beograd, 1993, p. 16.
[4] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle Porodična biblioteka #5, Block 45, 2003, p. 8.