What drew me to photography was a freedom from words; a possibility to work with and out of silence and to somehow let silence be felt in my work.
As a starting photographer, I began by photographing inanimate things – empty corners and gardens at night. After a few years at the art academy, I was given a portrait assignment and, though petrified of working with people, I made a complete switch. Since then, I have been solely focused on portraiture. But, despite the drastic change in subject matter, the urge to reduce things to a bare minimum remained.
Irma, 2011
Hannah, 2010
All Images are Courtesy of the Artist
I think silence is interesting because, like a blank sheet, it represents pure potential, interpretable in a million different ways. Fundamentally, all two-dimensional art is silent, yet some works carry a stronger meditative quality than others. I aim for this kind of a meditative note in my photographs. I like to imagine a good two-dimensional work of art as hypnotising, as muffling all surrounding sounds and engulfing the viewer until an enigmatic connection is formed. This is the kind of work I react to the strongest, work that addresses my intuition and not my intellect; work like Gerhard Richter’s, Tony Scherman’s or Adrian Ghenie’s, that stirs some deeper, illogical note. This is also what fascinates me most about art: it’s ability to touch on the mystery.
Essentially, it is a part of this mystery that I search for in the portrait. I’m interested in capturing a fragment of our infinite ambiguity and complexity in something as seemingly simple and straightforward as a human face. To do this, I reduce. I reduce as much as I possibly can without falling into abstraction. I reduce everything I think makes it easy for the viewer to ‘read’ the image: the context, the visual codes, the classifiable signs of belonging to a group, genre or a type of a person, explicit expressions. In a certain sense, I chip away at my sitters’ ‘outer’ layers, sculpting them inwards until I reach what I think is a more honest, original state. Until, in a sense, an image becomes hollow enough to echo. Until it ceases to rely on thoughts and definitions to prop it up. What I’m after is an intuitive response, not a thought but a sentiment. Or even better, a presentiment, one that arises out of the possibilities of a silent place.
Mirjana Vrbaski is one of the winners of Conscientious Portfolio Competition 2011. Read an Interview with Vrbaski by Jorg M. Cölberg right here.
Ilona, 2011
Girl, 2009
Judith, 2010
Nare, 2008
Anna, 2011
Jessica, 2011
Bianca, 2011
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