Contemporary photography: Slovenia

With Boris Gaberščik and Bojan Radovič, the FOTOHOF is showing representatives of younger Slovenian photography for the first time in Austria. Slovenian photography in the 1960s and 1970s was very much characterised by an aesthetic of amateur photography clubs. Gaberščik and Radovič have broken away from this not always positive tradition and represent photography as a medium at the cutting edge. The pursuit of beauty and a permanent effort to ennoble photography to the level of fine art (for example, by including traditional painterly iconography – landscape, portrait, nude, still life) as well as an adherence to a sometimes academic formalism indeed seemed outdated to many Slovenian photographers by the end of the 1970s. In the context of international developments, the 1980s brought, on the one hand, more subjective works and, on the other, media-reflective explorations of the ways and possibilities of photography.