Display of awarded pieces from the eighth year of the FRAME international photographic competition, the objective of which is to provide a representative space for free photography from Central Europe.
The FRAME photo competition attracts mainly young photographers and students of photography from universities. The spectrum of their works highlight the state and character of photography of the new generation in the region of Central Europe, based on which we can formulate a general opinion of the state of art today.
Almost 130 works applied this year, a considerable part of which could be classified as staged photography, and most of which were finalized on computer. Another noticable group of works dealt with maping the suburbs, periphery of towns and villages, focusing on banal objects or unidentifiable spaces. These photographs could have been taken virtualy "anywhere and nowhere". The staged photographs were mostly records of situations with a certain psychological impact. Using "strange characters" or still lifes, the authors were trying to deal with the situation in current society. The works dealing with suburbs were deliberately indifferent, without any identification of place or space.
Documentary and journalistic photography were totaly absent. This is a general fact, it is absent not just at the universities but also in the galleries. Just a few students in art schools and universities are intentionally focused on documentary photography. I see a possible reason for that in the fact that the reputation of objective documentary photography has taken a beating in the digital media. This resulted in a need to perfectly control what we photograph.
The interesting thing about some works was a certain revival of the modern tradition in photography. They were mostly inconspicuous projects which experimented with abstraction, ordinariness and black-and-white. I am not able to give an exact name to this phenomenon in contemporary pho- tography but I think that it could be something that may start growing into a definite style, one contrary to the world based on constant change.
Bohunka Koklesová, art historian,
member of the FRAME012 jury,
Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava
The competition is organised by the MIMO association. The main partners of the competition are Canon and EIZO.
The exhibition is held under the patronage of Roman Onderka, Mayor of Brno.
