Posavec's book of pairs

Pairs are both obverse and reverse. They have been there since the beginning. They include
every potential "duplicity of language" and slippage of meaning. This is what is at the core of
Ivan Posavec's photography and the reason why this book was created now, after more than
fifty years of photographing. The reason why it had to be exactly like this is the same. Just
when we thought we already knew everything about Ivan Posavec's portraits. It answers
almost all questions about his photography. Of course, if they are even possible and if they
are necessary. Here are all his places of interference, spaces "in between" as well as spaces
of "touch". It is in these places that lies the great redemption beyond the myth of the black
border or the wide-angle lens. That is the "macadam" that leads from the faces we know or
get to know with Posavec, to the names we might have forgotten or never even knew. The
book offers an answer to the question of what it means to photograph and what it means to
be photographed, but at the same time it embodies the questions of survival, of Ivan
Posavec himself and the inevitable place his photography occupies in the history and in the
present of photography.
"Nice trick. Let's see if an argument can be made. We are made of dreams and, no matter
how warm and full we are, we will die in severe pain if we cannot sign what we spent our
lifetime on. I am not talking about good and evil, about the last judgment and the seventh
seal. The categories of good and evil belong to another system, they mean nothing at all. I'm
talking about overlapping images - internal and external, other people's and personal. About
the insatiable hunger and the insatiable need to overlap the vision and view.'' 1
In the text, densely interwoven with the conversation with Posavec, Viculin, to whom this
book is dedicated along with Josip Klarica, Mija Vesović and Tomislav Gotovac, talks about
Posavec's magical concept of pairs and explains the relationship between his newspaper,
"commissioned" photographs , "photographs that have been used for a living" and those
same photographs that, removed from such a context, speak a completely different
language: "One photograph is like one axis in the endless spaces of possible perceptions, two
are already a coordinate system.''2 However, this is only one of the apparent and meaningful
ambiguities covered in this book. All these faces, persons, and spaces, as an integral and
indispensable part of a photographic portrait, line up in front of us in their multiple
1
Marina Viculin, ''Ivan Posavec – Pametna slika at: ''Ivan Posavec – Fotografije ’71-'02'', Klovićevi dvori, Zagreb,
Galerija Klovićevi dvori, Zagreb, 2002., p. 14.
2
Ibid, p. 15.
meanings: of identity, sociological, political, anthropological, cultural, temporal, spatial.
However, subjects are not in any Sanderian way standardized or systematized, be it by
occupation, age, status, or any other taxonomic principle. The photos are not even
chronologically grouped, nor are they gathered within individual thematic chapters. The
author signs only the place, the year of photo shooting and the name and surname, and not
with every photo. Those faces conceal and reveal at the same time. They are both portraits
and anti-portraits. They are both "known" and unknown, depending on the generation which
observes them. For some, they will all be unknown, while for others, some of these faces, in
a direct or less direct way, marked an era. With his analogies, Posavec erases the existing
boundaries between the intimate and the public, between the village and the city, between
what we see and what Posavec sees, between the distant and the near past. More than a
decade separates us from the last photograph included in this book, which is also the result
of the author's selection and process of reconceptualizing his own work. Just as, according to
Hans Belting, a face is not a face until it interacts with other faces in such a way that it looks
or is looked at, Posavec directs us to reconsider the "content" of his photographs, to think
about what the frame or the face - the body - space did not include at the first glance:
anxiety and desire, political act, innocence, lie, definition, life and death. 3 At the same time,
Posavec does not project, condemn or criticize - he leaves that to us. His portrait is the result
of a sharp intuition and a rare and fascinating ability to present the known or newly
discovered secret of the person portrayed, to draw out those inner, invisible, and entangled
threads. Each of these portraits is the result of that significant encounter, the photographer
and the photographed, confirming Arnold Newman's famous maxim: You don't take pictures
with your camera. You take pictures with your mind and your heart.'' 4 Posavec's portrait also
has, like Newman's, points of contact with the portrait in the environment, but with a
meaningful and visual counterpoint. With the same subversive counterpoint and distance
that is at times ironic or surreal, at times deeply and truly realistic or self-referential, which
he shared with Klarica or Gotovac and still shares with Vesović. These are not the spaces that
Posavec deliberately constructed in order to enhance the features or character of the
portrayed person, but in the coincidences he finds, he spontaneously and radically levels his
relationship with the subject. The deeper regularities affected in this way become visible
3
Alice Maurice, ''Face and Mask: A Double History by Hans Belting'', https://asapjournal.com/face-and-mask-a-
double-history-by-hans-belting-alice-maurice/, accessed: 30. 3. 2023.
4
https://arnoldnewman.com/, accessed: 25. 3. 2023.
only in his photographic field, which he strictly edges with a black border. That black border,
of which we know so much, or think we know, is in Posavec's words, his fortification, his
attitude, and his entire defense system against the world that exists outside the limits of the
wide-angle lens and beyond the horizon of photography. This is what makes the coordinate
system complete. It is necessary to look at Posavec's pairs from another perspective. What is
he telling us through his pairs? It is a puzzle that necessarily unfolds complex fields of
discourse in front of every observer. Posavec sees something that the rest of us do not.
When we become aware of that, nothing is as it seemed. Pairs are thus playing the game.
Each pair brings a new idea, a new communication, a new redefinition of what a portrait is
for Posavec. Somewhere we will recognize points of contact in the arrangement and
dynamics of light and shadow, the geometry of details and patterns, and somewhere we will
have to look beyond the purely visual components of the photographic language. We will
delve into identities, into possible relationships, recognize faces and their iconicity, and try
to understand what attracts us to them so much. This book also faces an eternally yearned-
for challenge - could this book be a completely new book about Ivan Posavec's portraits? In
any case, in terms of publishing, the book comes from Sisak, and with that fact it carries a
silent but courageous mission to cover all Posavec's "journeys" down the ideological
macadam of Sisak - Dužica - Zagreb.