MARIAN’S ”LEFTOVERS”

This exhibition comprises only a small proportion of Marian’s work. It offers a view, an insight, into the everyday reality of a world that no longer exists. I focused on secondary photos of children and shots that help complete the story of Marian’s life. They are snapshots that capture moments between “real” shots. I often ask myself what makes a good photograph. I always get the same answer: it depends on what you want to say. Are they good? Useful? Bad? Useless? These concepts are fluid and always contingent on the beholder. I find the threshold between shots as interesting as the threshold between childhood and adulthood, past and future. The selection was made out of images in Marian’s massive archive marked “leftovers”. They are “not right” for all sorts of reasons, be it due to emotions and sensibilities or technical and formal flaws. The moment you don’t have the right so-called “exhibition” moment, or even worse, when the children are assembled in some absurd formation by their parents with everything looking ship shape, the child becomes but an object for the photographer to document.

To me, Marian’s photo archive is unique in containing an incredible number of images of the children of my generation photographed between 1980 and 1983 in the same town. Knowing many of them personally enables me to have a more sensitive take on these images, which capture a time when both they and I were children. The people who originally “commissioned” the images rejected them because they were not deemed fit to serve the “presentational” purposes they were intended for. Nevertheless they are still wonderful documents of a particular time and place. Today, the idea of producing such an archive, full of photographic blunders, seems almost unthinkable. It is not just due to developments in technology, thanks to which unwanted “leftovers” have no chance of surviving, but also to the fact that mass access to the medium of photography itself has had a considerable effect on the social role of the photographer. Today we don’t need a photographer to take pictures of our children, we do it ourselves.

– Lucia Nimcová