BORIS MISSIRKOV & GEORGI BOGDANOV
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
BORIS MISSIRKOV & GEORGI BOGDANOV
Veterans of Culture… The multifunctional artistic duo Missirkov & Bogdanov is involved in advertisement, documentary and other photography, they produce, direct and shoot musical clips and films and they create TV programs. They concentrate on the crossing points where elitist and mass culture merge in the hope to pinpointing the nerves of our culture. In their portrait photographs, Missirkov & Bogdanov continuously go back to the “glory and drama” of the single human being. The cycle Veterans of Culture is dedicated to elderly people living in a retirement house, all of them divorcees or survivors of spouses. All their lives, they had worked in the field of culture, had enjoyed various degrees of success, had had their ups and downs, and had actually lived through and “survived” a long period of history of the world and their country Bulgaria that is generally referred to as totalitarianism. This same period is often thought of as unpleasant, to say the least, by popular media and opinion, however to these people it was the time of their youth. The warmth of the work comes from the combination of excerpts from talks between the artists and their models, and from the direct gaze of the camera. In this context the variety of life experience merges with the variety of visual appeal and the entire texture of the past is visible. The telling irony of the cycle is the realization that the ex-heroes of socialist culture are now reduced to TV soap opera watchers. At best they are matching their memories of the (un)realized promises of the past against the glossy screen images of what their great grand children might be able to enjoy “once upon a future”… Iara Boubnova |