April 24 - May 17, 2003

Tomasz Konart | five cities: photo based work | review

>opening Saturday, april 26 | 2 - 6pm

Five Cities

by Corinna Ghaznavi

In the second that the shutter releases a photograph framing a single view is produced. The image is both straight documentation and construction in that it records what is there and yet omits the context, the wider perspective. The photograph attests to place and time, its existence is a testimony to the taker's presence; it both reenacts and fabricates memory. The moment an event is documented that event is already in the past and the image captured of it always already an interpretation. When viewed later it can trigger real and imagined memories connected to that place and time: a photograph can transport the taker to the past in a physical way, awakening forgotten memories. It can also appear foreign so that its author must construct a new narrative around it in order to make sense of its presence.

Tomasz Konart's Five Cities consists of three images of each: Berlin, Lodz, Warszawa, Nurnberg and Toronto. The names appear discreetly at the bottom of each image, a directive, or perhaps a quiet reminder and confirmation of presence at that place. Despite the identification they do not elaborate on a city the way one is used to: Konart does not photograph what one might associate as typical of a particular place. Rather, he captures a single ubiquitous moment that he later selects as containing significance.

The amount of information a photograph can convey is both endless and finite. Seeking meaning in the images that Konart gives us means that the viewer must traverse a course similar to the artist, whose creative process is sifting, grouping, and selecting. Konart views the act of photographing as impulsive and necessary. He takes rolls of film rapidly or in succession. He frames what he sees in front of him quickly, understanding that one never knows in advance what one is going to get. Later, he pulls out his images and constructs a visual narrative that compels him. The process is one tightly entwined with experience, revealing memory as faulty and reality as constructed.

These images have been taken over a period of fifteen years. I imagine Konart spreading them out, examining them slowly, allowing a narrative to appear. It is a test of memory, perhaps contradicting how one remembers something, forcing him to recall why one view would have seemed worth capturing, and what was on the periphery, outside of the camera view. The viewer too is required to bring their own experiences and memories to Konart's images. Yet it is tricky terrain: do we recognize that bridge in Berlin because the text has given us a clue? What visual cue leads us to think that there is something familiar in the photograph of Warsaw? The text acts as directive and misleader. The images stand contained and on their own. The hands above suggest both attachment and remoteness, signifying fragmentation, introspection and connection simultaneously.

Five Cities is essentially about photography itself. The frozen moment that is retained; the framing of that moment; the play between staging and the real; the performative act of the photographer who, for the moment of taking his picture, is not a participant in the world he records but who then subsequently makes sense of that world. What Konart gives us are interstitial glimpses into some aspect of a place. Time shifts fluidly between when the image was taken, the memory of it, and the present from where it is viewed. Together, Five Cities offers a visual story both private and open to the viewer. What began as a snapshot, what may have been documentation, is now poetry, rich with nuances and quietly resonating.