Lovable Edmonton
Hand-colored B&W silver gelatin prints (40cm x 58cm)
Click to enlarge
“There is something magic and electric in the simple fact of choosing a
subject (a place, a moment, an event, a person, things, stones, trees) and
working around them, into them, picture by picture. Is it an illusion, or
am I right to feel that you have only really seen something when you have
fully, lovingly, sensually photographed it?” Thus spoke Fosco Maraini a
photographer and ethnographer extraordinaire.
Marko makes painstaking photographic studies of empty bus stops on the
route of the Bus No. 6 in Edmonton using medium and large format cameras,
B&W film, and enlarging to vintage graded paper in the darkroom. Gordana
colors the photos in the old coloring technique.
As recent immigrants, Gordana and Marko are trying to make the city of
Edmonton their own by lovingly documenting bus stops as those urban nodes
that tend to be relegated to the realm of the “infra-ordinary” – too commonplace
to be noticed. This kind of prolonged, sustained, obsessive attention to
detail sharpens perception and lifts the infra-ordinary into the extra-ordinary.
It is ethnographic in its embrace of the Malinowskian “imponderabilia of
everyday life,” and artistic in its concern with form and emotion. The inspiration
for this project comes from George Perec’s Species of Spaces, Hiroshige’s
53 Stages of Tokaido, and Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards.
This work denies irony.
Exhibited at 2009 Ethnographic Terminalia, at the Ice Box gallery (Crane Arts) Philadelphia, December 2009.
