S16 photos on Flickr

The exhibition “Second Retake” shown at the Synthesis Photography Gallery consists of twenty-five black-and-white portraits photographed in a studio with a large format camera, on negative panchromatic photographic plates 9 by 13 centimetres each which have been scanned, retouched and printed on a large format inkjet printer.

Does this mean that it’s a photography exhibition?

I don’t think so. More like, those are post-photographs.

Or, to start over again,

“Second Retake” Post-Photography Exhibition by Sonya Stankova

The studio portrait as a keepsake has long stopped existing.

Those unusual and slightly scary, especially for the children, spaces, with ante rooms, cashiers and a darkened studio, in which you enter as if in an X-ray room, whether you were being photographed for memory’s sake or X-rayed, the feeling was similar, you were being arranged at the proper place, told not to breathe or move and photographed.

Gone are the photographers in working coats attesting to the special status of employees of an institution vested with functions and privileges by society to be reckoned with.

The studio has always inspired such respect because it used to be a workshop for myths and unwittingly the people who were being photographed, without knowing it, sensed it intuitively and assumed the most imposing and memorable posture, to be left to the future generations. That photo was not for them, it was for their children and grandchildren, to be remembered, to be looked at in albums and remind them of their shared happy moments in life.

Myths also start their existence from the photograph for memory’s sake.

Not from those for a passport or another document, that one is official, temporary, irrelevant to history, the photo for memory is in one or two copies, bigger, with a curly frame, the one for a document is small, ten copies, in boxes, like postal stamp issues.

In the post-photographs by Sonya Stankova there is a baby, children, pioneers and brigade workers, youth, an aged gypsy, friends, colleagues and strangers, a nun, a smiling disabled man and other personages reminiscent of a Fellini catalogue for film extras. So different and yet so similar in their photographic subservience to the lens of the camera.

In them as in illustrations for Barth’s Notes we can see the statement for the crossing of the four notions, before her camera the subjects are those they take themselves for, those they would like to pass for, the ones Sonya sees during the second retake and, finally, those who have turned to objects that she uses to show her art.

The photographic studio is like a time machine, the people in it are passengers, they enter, pay a fee, sit down, look into the lens and exit. And travel in time, into the future, to unknown distances through the years. Thirty years of age in this exhibition and the next stop is unknown.

The real photography is there in the emulsion of the negative, it belongs to the time of the capturing, to the moment of the sitting down in the studio.

In the hall, before the public, there are twenty-five mathematical combinations of billion numbers, program and stamp interpretations which have re-created time and the people in it. This is why those portraits are post-photographs.

But in the Synthesis Gallery it turns out that we also are in a virtual time machine which moves for us in the reverse direction this time, backwards, to that studio, back then, when Sonya Stankova was behind the camera.

Assoc. Prof. Nikola Lautliev

Plovdiv

1st March 2016

s16 by Freddie and Sam

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s16 by Steve Evans