Old master Gunārs Binde focuses on photography with a smartphone at the exhibition “Walk with …” / Article

This is not art! It’s just a walk! Gunārs Binde, one of the most outstanding Latvian photographers, comments on his passion for photography with a smartphone. He explains that out of 99 percent of society’s interest in photography as a phenomenon, art is found in only one percent.

“All the thickening in the whole world that happened, all the reorientation caused both reflection and nihilism about what I was really doing. , which is art, “explains Binde.

The photographer admits that smartphones saturated with modern technology are very smart and full of various functions and possibilities: “You don’t have to think anymore. Just don’t move your finger. You don’t have to strain your brain to conjure up an image of art. “I don’t take a picture of what I see, but I photograph what I think of what I see. I photograph my thoughts in that picture.”

In the exhibition, the photographer self-critically associates only two pictures from the exhibition exposition. Almost a 100-year-old picture of the school class, in which the children were later numbered and deciphered by surnames. And a photo from a fashion design exhibition, which the master associates with human queues for services.

“Photography, like literature, must be read. Word by word. Any note, everything visible must be read. Why and in what connection is what is visible. If it is not read, then photography is not mastered,” the artist emphasizes. “Cheap art is to catch the moment. To catch the best. I believe that catching a flea is more successful than catching when something happens and asking for your luck. Great luck is the case. take a picture, then it is, but these cases do not occur so often. “

The cases encountered by Gunārs Binde in the photographs in the exhibition “Walk with…” in Rainis and Aspazija’s summer house in Jūrmala will be on view until June 25.

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