Dmitri Borko

Eulogy to a friend¹

Gorny is the wrong kind of photographer. In fact, he’s not a photographer at all. To be honest, I haven't a clue who he is, nor do I know or understand what he’s doing, but because I myself am a photographer I'm glad that he's speaking a language I understand...

Gorny is the wrong kind of photographer, whichever way you look at it. "Professional" photo-lovers, refined (being mostly former IT people and sysadmins) in the most advanced digital technology, would probably wince dismissively at his clumsy and outdated attempts to transform his images with the help of Photoshop. A professional would most likely accuse him of a lack of clearly formulated themes of his own, a disparateness of manner and genre, randomness and insignificance of his subjects. And also of the fact that his pictures, taken with a not very powerful digital camera and adapted “for the Web”, don't actually exist, being unsuitable for serious polygraphic reproduction. I.e. they're "amateur".

I don't understand how he DOES IT either. I don't even understand WHAT he's doing. I like some of his pictures very much. In different ways and for different things. For example, I like very much his Sky. Or rather Heavens. They are almost everywhere, they are always different, they provide tone and atmosphere, and you can understand why the picture with the blue firmament, criss-crossed with aeroplane trails, was immediately christened simultaneously by several viewers as "Gorny's flag". What else? A certain nagging feeling of the absolute materialism and at the same time transient nature of the world caught in the frame. Style...

The above is how I started off when my friend (and I hope I can call him that) Gorny asked me to look at and review his work, prepared for a personal exhibition in London. When I'd written it I couldn't add another single word: I didn't know what to write. Until I realised that my shocked reaction to the contemplation of all the works together could be expressed by just a single word - ENVY.

Recently, while in my own creative stupor, I looked over a whole load of photos on the net, trying to correlate myself with time, with fashion and with the standard of my colleagues... I discovered very high technical standards among studio photographers, able to set lighting beautifully (and incidentally having the corresponding state-of-the-art cameras). Everyone in their pictures were the same and like the last issue of a glossy magazine. Very stylish. I looked at reporters who could tell the story of any event in the world so effectively and in such detail, as if they had got inside the stomach of a president or some fighter and were taking pictures out through their mouths. At a speed of 16 frames per second at ASA 10,000. And as if all the pictures were taken by a very efficient machine. I saw "photo artists" manically developing their only stylistic discoveries. Which is quite natural - after all the best way of selling art today is to create for yourself an absolutely and uniquely recognisable image.

So what does Gorny do? He simply makes Photographs. That is, he looks, thinks and tries to tell. Yes, when you see many of his pictures at once, you first have an impression of absolute eclecticism. Here is the black and white, grainy expressionism of the figures blurred in motion and the most clear-cut, frozen in light hyperrealism of the bike lying on the grass and the constructivist angles of Oxford’s architecture and a Flemish-like landscape and the naive simplicity of a trifling detail or an everyday scene like the photographers of the sixties… However, there is an ideal sense of style in every single shot. He can do this and that. He can simply snap or transform beyond recognition. But this is not stylization. Being an enlightened and sensitive person, he just finds out the most precise means for each given expression. And this easy, even cheeky manipulation of styles and genres reveals his total freedom from them. For in every one of his shots you can see a completely vivid world and a completely vivid Gorny reaction to it… The inconceivable combination of knowledge and mastery of form with the total nakedness of EMOTION. Wisdom and freedom. And no ambitions. Or sheer ambition. Nowadays, few can do this. I envy him. And I also envy the fact that he takes photographs not because he is a photographer but that he is a photographer because he takes photographs.

Most of all I like the seagull flying beyond the edge of the frame from some lighthouse which could quite easily be an ordinary house. It's very free. And very alone...

Notes