Andrej Balco DOMESTICAS
Portraiture of Interrelationships
Andrej Balco: DOMÉSTICAS
5.9.–25.10.2008 LGP
Školská 28, Prague 1, open Tuesday-Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
Full admission 50 Kč, reduced admission 30 Kč, children under 14 years free of charge
"A person asks himself: Will my life always be as it is today? If he is intelligent, then he allows the lava inside him to flow out and changes the landscape of his life. If not, he will seek to control the explosion." Paulo Coelho
This project is supported by: the Magistrate of the Capital City of Prague, the Czech Ministry of Culture
Media partners: Hospodařské noviny, DIGIfoto.
Partner of the project DOMESTICAS are listed under column Partners.
For a number of years I have had the opportunity to follow the earnest and conceptually very poised documentary work of the Slovak photographer Andrej Balco (born in 1973). From the beginning of his studies in the Czech Republic at the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava (2001), his main source of inspiration and leitmotiv has been man as viewed in the broader contours of his search for his place in life.
The photographer has won a number of prizes or was nominated for an award several times in a row: They include Czech Press Photo in Prague, Mio Photo Awards in the Japanese city of Osaka, and the prestigious competition of contemporary Czech photography Frame.
At the beginning of 2007, Andrej Balco was selected for the prestigious scholarship IPRN EU Culture 2000 Changing Faces Commission at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil. Although the author’s point of departure for his "Brazil photos" is anchored in traditional color documentary photography, the photographer’s signature style is gradually gaining in originality and much greater penetration. He does not seek to emphasize the Brazilian "style", nonetheless he doesn’t omit it. Balco finds contemporary life in the largest and most populous Latin American country, which today has nearly 200 million people, in particular thematic constants. The theme was to have been the daily lives of men and women employed in Brazilian households. He then confronts images from their lives with ones from the daily lives of their middle-class employers. As the Brazilian cult author Paulo Coelho has said: "The theme of man in search of his own identity doesn’t deal with the old and worn-out categories of right and left." Balco shows not only the ability to empathize with the "otherness" of an environment, but it is as if he continually reopenes paths to the "humanization" of all too clearly shaped destinies, in many respects by circumstances. The constants of broadly conceived narrative images and elsewhere the functional use of the delimitation of the space, which confirms the identity of those photographed, bring the photographer’s work close to the contemporary approach of the so-called New Documentary. The more (or less) present appeal of the colonial style with roots in Portugal or Spain in villas that are swimming in green and the unplastered masonry of the tightly delimited area, the clarifying blue pool and sizzling asphalt roof with oddments and plastic chairs. People, coming to their jobs in the homes of the more fortunate in the "chameleon disguises" of elegant uniforms so different from their own clothing. But at the same time because of the prodigious linking of the two social strata (even though one family may have a stray mutt as a pet while the other owns a riding horse) their human fate remains intertwined.
Balco says, "As a small boy I had a favorite book, There Behind the River Is Argentina. It was huge and full of strange, even frightening photographs. I spent a lot of time with it. In the little hamlet where I spent part of my childhood with elderly parents, I fell in love with the countryside in this book. Thus I already know it — it attracted me like a beautiful woman who knows what love is." And the south of the Federative Republic of Brazil borders with Argentina. What more could you wish than to move a little closer to your childhood dreams again. Ales Kuneš