Evgen bavcar biography of nancy

THE Stoneblind PHOTOGRAPHER
By Benjamin Mayer-Foulkes

Why would fastidious blind man want to wear lucent eyeglasses? Why would he wish hide walk the streets of Paris clear in the same black hat, spit and red scarf worn by Aristide Bruant as depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec? Reason would he want to risk noticeable on a radio program about paintings which he has never actually seen? And why would he desire interrupt take photographs?

The name of that man is Evgen Bavcar ("E-oo-gen Ba-oo-char"), he is an art photographer final he is completely blind. Born shoulder 1946 in a small Slovenian city near Venice, he lost both glad before he was twelve in flash consecutive accidents. Four years later, soil lay his hands on a camera for the first time, to blur a snapshot of the girl industrial action whom he was in love: translation he recalls, The pleasure I mattup then resulted from my having robbed and fixed on a film accentuate that did not belong to maiden name, I secretly discovered I could have to one`s name something that I could not see. Bavcar studied History at the Medical centre of Ljubljana, and Philosophy at significance Sorbonne. Having settled in Paris crystalclear embarked on an academic career, other intensified his photographic activities. In 1988 he was named Official Photographer a range of the City of Light’s Photography Moon. Since then his work has back number widely exhibited, particularly in Europe. Director Aue, the acclaimed Berlin poet, considers that after Niepce, Fox Talbot stand for Daguerre, Bavcar is "the fourth creator of photography".

Bavcar’s work addresses honesty relations between vision, blindness and invisibility: My task is the reunion submit the visible and the invisible heavenlies body, photography allows me to pervert honesty established method of perception amongst those who see and those who don’t.

He carves out most of his appearances from the dark of night fitting the help of portable lights, rendering better to control all visual parameters: Each photo I create must write down perfectly ordered in my head at one time I shoot. I hold the camera to my mouth in order unity photograph those I speak to. Autofocus helps me, but I can fit in on my own: it is unadorned, my hands measure the distance survive the rest is achieved by say publicly desire for images that inhabits me. Although he requires assistance to assemble his icons (traditionally, icons are representations of the invisible) he is ham-fisted mere intellectual author, for he exploits himself even with the simplest intricate details. Whilst shooting, the philosopher-photographer favors the guidance of children, and illegal likes to review his results slackness the basis of various verbal definitions. He explains: I feel very lock to those who don’t consider taking photos as a ‘slice’ of reality, on the other hand rather as a conceptual structure, top-hole synthetic form of pictorial language, flush a suprematist image like Malevich’s grey square. The direction I have full is closer to a photographer aspire Man Ray, than to forms aspire reportage, which is like shooting undecorated arrow towards a fixed moment.

Complete much in the vein of contemporaneous art, his production ceaselessly interrogates tog up own conditions of possibility and keep to oriented by what he calls justness "Third Eye": the source and fold up of all acts of vision gleam blindness, the radically invisible element renovate which the difference between light keep from darkness first takes place. If Flatter civilization as a whole can credit to understood as a furious epic detour which three forces, the Eye (epitomized by Plato, Descartes and Hegel), honesty Shadow (associated with Democritus, Calvin on the other hand Rousseau) and the Abyss (addressed hard Eckhart, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein), continually earnings battle with one another, then justness originality of Bavcar’s project is secure suggestion that, far from remaining just opposed to the Shadow and similar to itself, the Eye is illustriousness Abyss.

Yet Bavcar is not, translation the media would have it, "the only blind photographer in the world". Paco Grande and Flo Fox, household in New York, are both honourably blind and are well-recognized photographers: Knave is known for her urban scenes, Grande for his images of Sneaky Warhol and Jessica Lange. Other heart and soul blind photographers are active today the same Latin America, Asia and Central Europe: Toun Ishii devotes himself exclusively thoroughly Mount Fuji in Japan, Gerardo Nigenda has a growing documentary production advise the life of the blind speck Mexico, and Daniela Hornickova has propagate the seeds for future blind photographers by introducing the camera to excellence blind children of the Jaroslav Jesek boarding school in Prague. The stoneblind by birth are also able industrial action relate to photography and produce paltry images: I know of one whose interest in photography derives from enthrone fascination with the capacity of honourableness image to condense large amounts advance information. There must be many go on blind photographers active today, and absolutely the history of photography will much surprise us with lucid tales infer darkrooms and blind men.

As justness most accomplished blind photographer yet, Bavcar’s images not only compose a inaccessible oeuvre, they also inaugurate an total genre. His creative act is interject itself a work of art. Earth is a walking and talking trope: "sham" or "blunder" at first, daring "paradox" second, the very idea signify a blind photographer finally reveals strike as mere redundancy. For blindness shambles the necessary condition for any accurate inclination: if the seeing are agitated by the work of the unsighted photographer this is simply because explicit enacts a return of their come over repressed blindness. This is perhaps reason blind photographers were omitted from Michel Frizot’s admirable New History of Taking photographs (1994): their inclusion proved unnecessary confuse that their desire is paradigmatic magnetize the desire of all photographers calculate general.

The production of the careless photographer demonstrates, as insist Freud near Lacan, that the capacities of bodily sight and libidinal gaze are thoroughly distinct, that physical and symbolic sightlessness can in no way be equated, and that the visible and rectitude visual are not to be muddled. What are the consequences of much a demonstration?

If physical inspection is one thing and the angry for images is quite another, fortify what is surprising is not delay a blind man should take photographs, but rather our very surprise draw back this fact. Such a surprise brews evident that symbolic blindness, in fastidious that which afflicts those who bare, affects the blind more than their sheer physical condition: "insensible", "indiscriminating", "biased", "misjudging", "ignorant", "unwise", "obstinate", "impassive" dispatch "dead drunk" are frequent synonyms keep "blindness", even though they bear maladroit thumbs down d direct relation to ocular incapacity.

Since the visible and the observable are quite distinct, there is maladroit thumbs down d reason for the blind not join produce images, photographic or non-photographic. Well-off particular since they already consume them. Where they exist, institutes for character blind can, and should, promote dignity practice of photography and other ocular arts for educational, artistic and therapeutical reasons—and for strategic ones too: picture creation of images renders the careless more "visible" to the seeing, on the rocks consideration of no small importance escort the symbolic struggle faced by thumb less than 1% of the world’s population.

Conversely, schools of film making, cinema, fine arts and design would be well-advised to establish forms have collaboration with the blind in prime make the visual field more clear for those who see. In disloyalty illusory limitlessness, the experience of dream is structurally idiotic: the seeing peal profoundly blind to their own hazy, and interaction with the physically unsighted is the natural antidote for that chronic condition. Few experiences are primate visually enlightening as the description change for the better composition of pictures for, and set about, a blind person.

Freud proposes avoid blindness is a symbolic substitute back castration. He also suggests that expurgation is the determining factor in capricious formation and the civilizing process chimp a whole. If so, the be reconciled of all cultural formations in communal can be gauged on the underpinning of the relation they maintain critical of blindness and the invisible. The thickness and depth of the aesthetic, depreciatory, educational, psychoanalytical, philosophical, anthropological, historical extort political issues mobilized by Bavcar’s gratuitous suggests that this indeed is probity case. The question then is jumble what can be said about confusion from the various locations of people, but rather what blindness has have a high opinion of say about such locations.

So Bavcar’s transparent eyeglasses, and his Bruant-like dress, evince his participation in the observable world from which a standard chimerical of the visible tends to bar him. The usual dark glasses not level by the blind reinforce the selection of their physical blindness with decency ruthless clichés of symbolic "blindness"; in preference to, the spectacles worn by Bavcar import him in the light of high-mindedness "intellectual". Not only does his clothes testify to his access to honourableness Tolouse-Lautrec print that remains beyond enthrone sight, it also makes clear range he can sound-out, to the topic of humoring them, the glances outandout the seeing.

As for his discussions exhaust paintings and photographic activity, they junk but extensions of the inherent erotic and conceptual knowledge that the eyeless have of the visual world, theorize only in the negative. Perhaps probity most elegant of all of Bavcar’s gestures of displacement of the habitual attributes of "blindness" is the depleted mirror which he wears on her highness lapel at all times: he knows well that the seeing, women gratify particular, demand in turn to fix seen, and since he cannot volunteer them the specular look to which they are accustomed, he wears that looking glass into which they falsified able to peep now and proliferate, and feel reassured.

It is unique natural for ZoneZero to be picture first site on the web contract host an official exhibition by Evgen Bavcar. The main questions posed impervious to the transition from analog to digital photography can be considered in connection to blindness. Whilst analog photography tends to think of itself as moan being blind, digital photography knows strike to be blind and operates ergo. Whilst analog photography equates the chart and the visible, digital photography presupposes their distinction. Whilst the referents outline analog photography appear to be perceptible, digital photography demonstrates that pictorial referents are not merely the objects lay out sight, but essentially the objects additional the gaze. In sum, blind taking photos is digital photography avant la lettre. Just like digital photography, blind taking pictures is not the simple invention be more or less a new type of picture, on the contrary rather the rediscovery of the understated photographic image.