He made his new photo series in the city of Yogyakarta, Java, where he has lived for a decade. Previously, he published an album of the island’s landscapes, now he photographed the locals against a black background. What is the exhibition about?
The title of the exhibition refers to a Javanese performance: Wayang means puppet, and Wayang Orang is a puppet show in which people perform the stories of the two great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Last year I decided to return to studio portrait photography, which in my case is technically a fairly simple genre. In my room, I hang a black canvas on a bamboo pole as a background and use a single lamp to light it. I photograph the people with whom I have something to do. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a portrait exhibition like this, the last time was in ’96, at the Dorottya Gallery. At that time, I photographed the contemporary writers with whom I had a closer relationship. In 2018, he released the album A þytőlősen, which was very far from the port genre. But now I’m back where I started in ’96.
But what was the root cause?
That I would be crazy to lock myself in a cage and say that I have to do only this or that for the rest of my life. I needed to somehow recreate a theater for myself. The studio is a kind of theater, whether you like it or not. From the moment you sit in the studio in front of a photographer and his camera, you are immersed in an atmosphere that tears you away from everyday reality. As a photographer, I simply needed this world again.
Who are the models in the photos?
All but two of the models are part of my life in Yogyakarta. A close friend or a more distant acquaintance, but definitely someone with whom I have a connection, who determines my life there. It doesn’t work for me otherwise. It won’t catch fire. In one of the pictures, for example, you can see an Indonesian film director with his two daughters, the eldest of whom is one of the best pianists in the country. The exhibition poster shows a visual artist and his wife, the man walks with crutches because he was run over by a car and didn’t have enough money to pay for the operation, so his leg was amputated. From then on, his life revolves around the fact that he organizes an annual art festival called Forest Art Camp in the poorest mountain villages of Java, where he tries to use the proceeds to help the population. The amazing thing about the genre of photography is that it takes its subject perfectly out of context, because until I have any information about the picture, I don’t know who is in it, nor what happened before and after the exposure. On the other hand, the strength of the personality comes through.
One of the photos resembles Francis Bacon’s painting of Pope Ince X, in which the subject’s face can barely be made out. Who is in this photo?
It’s a self portrait. It’s blurry because it was taken with a long exposure, so the way I stand up and go to the machine also left a mark on the picture. If it were a much more specific self-portrait, it would not be included in the exhibition. In this form, however, I felt that it belongs here, that it belongs to this story.
I guess it symbolizes that although the artist is present during the photography, he is still invisible.
Yes, but since the exhibition is about the wayang puppet show, the subject of the photo can be the dalang, that is, the master of these puppet shows, who moves the figures. In shadow plays, the melody is really invisible, since if you look at the side of the performances from the side of the screen, you only see the shadows of the puppets, not the puppet master. However, the last sentence of the text written for the exhibition is the most important, according to which the puppet master is nothing without the puppets, and his first task is to learn that wayangs have souls.
How does living in Java for such a long time affect you?
Perhaps I will be able to look at my own Western, Judeo-Christian, democratic culture from a different perspective. Of course, I will never have the perspective of a complete outsider. But I definitely have more insight than someone who spends his life locked in this world.
And how has your perspective changed?
I was saddened. From there, it’s pretty clear what we’re doing here. And a lot of things, the list starts at the level of human relations. Community is still important in Java. For the closest, for the family, and for wider communities as well. In our Western world, we only talk about community when it is organized around an axis, along some common interest. But if I pull out that axis, then the community fell apart at that moment. However, the community in the traditional sense is not built around an axis, but rather a net that grasps the person. And the power of community doesn’t even mean giving up the self. Don’t get me wrong, everyone in Java has their egos, sensitivities, desires and rages. Nevertheless, the community has weight.
Doesn’t the modern technology emerging in Java supersede this?
Technological progress does not have to automatically bring about the isolation that has occurred in Western society. In Java, I have seen quite a few examples of how technology and community can work side by side. I’ve spent more than five years there out of the last decade, and in that time I’ve never seen a person screaming on the street. When a problem happens, people smile and apologize to each other. For example, they have managed to preserve this to this day, despite the Internet and mobile phones. And this is a strong enough motivation for me to try to spend as much time there as possible. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have my inherent depression in Java, which I carry with me everywhere, but what the outside world puts on me at least dissipates there. Then I come home, and as soon as I get on the number six tram, I have stomach cramps again. And that’s pretty important, because that’s how we spend our lives. However, so far nothing more important than our lives has been invented.
Info: Attila Bartis. Wayang Orang. Curator: Zsolt Petrányi. Robert Capa Center for Contemporary Photography. It can be viewed until December 1
Only the person matters
With his new Javanese pictures, Attila Bartis proves that he is at home in the classic, black-and-white language of photography and boldly touches the genre of the portrait, Zsolt Petrányi, the curator of the exhibition, told our newspaper. According to him, the striking thing about the photos is that Bartis does not manipulate the images in any way, but rather lets the subjects stand in front of the camera in the pose and facial expression they choose. – Bartis does not touch the picture, but allows the subject’s personality to emerge. All this sounds simple, but portraiture is a complex genre, as a lot depends on the communication between the photographer and the subject. In the case of Bartis, photography is like the subject performing on a stage. He treats this as a fact, and therefore returns to the role of a classic portrait photographer, says Petrányi. According to the curator, the exhibition has another strength: – In the pictures, black and white equates people, that is, there is no skin color, no origin, but there is a person. Only the relationship between the artist and the person recorded by him matters, and Bartis is the sensitive master of this.
Source: nepszava.hu
