JANE ŠTRAVS: DAHAB, PHOTOGRAPHIC SERIES
Marina Gržinić
Štravs' photographs are an interstice between realities. This results in a division between the ordinary and the extraordinary that involves experiences of time and space different from those normally encountered in daily life. Every space has a history and every history is material and discursive at once. Štravs once again, but this time in another geopolitical frame, examines the boundaries of traditional landscape.
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FRAGILITY OF ARCHITECTURE
Davorka Perić
A photographic view includes the spontaneity and indolence necessary for a life of photography; however, this view and vista disappear in a moment. And, there remains the photographic record of a moment, vista, place and moment which has disappeared. Jean Baudrillard, in his text 'Photography or the Writing of Light', says that by fragmenting reality by means of photographic separation, an essentially unobjective image of the world emerges, and that a photograph, as paradoxical as it may sound, is the most unobjective image of the world in which a photographic lens reveals the lack of objectivity of the world. Baudrillard claims that with its stillness,silence and phenomenological reduction of movement, the photograph is confirmed as the purest and at the same time most artificial expression of an image.
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MOTEL BALKAN
Želimir Koščević
Photography can no longer be interpreted on the basis of the experience typical of high Modernism. From the early 1970s on, photography came to be considered an integral part of our visual culture by the media theory and critique. Jane Štravs's photographies are a clear example of such new visual culture that erases the boundaries of isolation of the medium of that time and represents a serious contribution to the revision of mimesis in photography. The reality of Štravs's photographs lies not outside of the image, but in the image itself.
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TOO MUCH, TOO LITTLE
Renata Štebih
However, Štravs is distinguished for duality, antagonism, passages between the opposites: from periphery to centre; from the moment in which everything is staged for the foreign gaze to intimacy; from the well-thought-out to the instinctively perceived image; disengaged and engaged at the same time – reality is the matter that Štravs transforms into an auctorial statement.
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ENIGMATIC MOVING-PICTURE ICONS
Marina Gržinić
In Štravs' photography various objects are presented in simple way, sometimes with repetitive motions over monochrome backdrops, creating enigmatic moving-picture icons. We see images that recall fascination with 1950s movies and the aesthetics of snapshots. Štravs presents shots of USA's mythologies, racial segregation and its militaristic turn. .
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EPHEMERAL NOTES ON URBANITY
Walter Seidl
In most of Štravs' scenarios, the chosen urban elements bear strong industrial features, which support the graphically constructed images in their powerful presence. In this respect, the fleeting urban dispositions relate to housing units and seascapes, harbors or abandoned factory units that mostly convey moments of urban wasteland; these are spaces which are the result of in-between zones or non-places with regard to Marc Augé.
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THE WORLD IN BLACK AND WHITE
Marina Gržinić
Take the color from fashion and all the glamour is off. All that you get in this Jane Štravs' fashion series is therefore the curves of the body, the sex appeal of a certain universal women beauty, and almost nothing is to be said about fashion. Here it is all about photography and the way of how to work with the photographic medium, with its basic language and its past, present and future potentialities. Definitely, the best fashion photography is not about fashion, but about everything else.
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FUEL MY DESIRE AND BREAK THE CODE, OR VANISH!
Marina Gržinić
His new series of photographs is an interstice between real and imaginary places. Female models’ bodies are provocatively real, and the landscape surrounding them is stubbornly imaginary. This results in a division between the ordinary and the extraordinary which involves different experiences of time and space from those normally encountered in daily life.
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TRANSFORMING FASHION AND REALITY
Walter Seidl
In the process of focusing on the immediate sexualization of body matter through hard-edged photographic scenes where every physical act follows an exact dramaturgy, Štravs always refers to forms of urbanity which are subject to re-urbanization and to demographic changes. The dichotomy of run-down environments combined with sexually highly stimulating gestures engenders visual projections into the near future which lies only in nuances away, but is already captured through precise compositions and professional technology inherent to the mastery of the medium.
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REVOLUTION AND YOUR WARDROBE
W. J. T. Mitchell
Štravs’ images are citings as much as they are sightings. They veer between the serious and the frivolous, and they manage to send up both, ironizing both the dark and the light side of revolution, while releasing an uncontrollable beauty. The question they pose, then, is not what is to be done, but what is to be worn.
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ŠTRAVS' PHOTOGRAPHIC INCARNATIONS
Marina Gržinić
Štravs' work is directed towards analyzing and reflecting the act of looking at photographs, taking into consideration the viewer's gender and /or his mind operations,and towards perceiving photography as a complex act of projections, voyerism, imagination or desires that mould the spectator's gaze.
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A PHOTOGRAPHIC ROAD MOVIE
Marina Gržinić
Jane Štravs' pictures create an unusual photographic road movie. The camera turns North America into a continent of images, enviably expressive views created by the camera and our imagination. The author's encounter with the North American continent and the climate of California is a ménage à trois between Štravs, photography and film.
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