Barthes argues that photography is where we put death in modern society; now that it has left religion and ritual, it finds its anthropological context in “this image” which produces death while attempting to preserve life.
Sky keepers is a series of black and white prints on tarpaulin appropriated from the book with the same title. The book is about the history of the former Yugoslav Air force dating from Tito`s era. The documentary character of the pictures gives us not only the idea about the aesthetics of social – realism but the very notion of depicting the communist era in a broader sense. It explains the mentality of representation itself, in other words, ways to identify and define equally one of the generic factors of the material culture of the former Yugoslavia.
Equally, it tends to roll out the general atmosphere from the times of so-called Tito’s path to reveal its essential psychological profile that more accurately defines and characterizes the nation’s (Serbs) relation towards the notion of authority.
In front of our eyes, the content of the given pictures becomes a discourse that becomes equally controversial and ambivalent as the medium it stands for. Thence, by reactivating the very medium, one emphasizes at the same time the phenomenology of the very medium (photography) and its diversified and complex effect on our material perception. We note that constant changes in looking at reality influence the shift of aesthetic convention. Therefore, it is not only that material perception is challenged by the relation between the substance and the medium, but the content changes its social and epistemological character and puts itself in a different context.
The ambivalence of the offered content underlines the issue of the cognition and quality of the photo depiction. This cognition and quality of the photograph thus bear constant revision.
The dubiousness of the photo depicted also carries doubt about the content itself.
Text by Filip Matić