Photo: Peter Fettich
7 – 28 November 2024
P74 Gallery
>exhibition view @P74 Gallery
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Solitude and loneliness are often equated as one and the same thing, but they can also be understood and experienced with a completely different meaning – solitude can have a positive connotation as we sometimes want nothing more than to be alone, to have time for ourselves, while loneliness represents a negative emotion. Photographer Peter Fettich spends a lot of time alone and likes solitude. Promises to Keep features works created in different spaces in the last five years, and they, at first glance, do not seem to share any tangible common characteristics in terms of the unity of space or time. But they do share the artist’s dedication to black-and-white analogue photography and the theme that gradually emerges from his work – a specific atmosphere captured in the images. Most of his photographs depict the landscape, mainly natural scenery, but we also encounter elements of the urban landscape and specific, clear and often highly telling details. In others, however, the details are practically unrecognisable. Contrasted with the serenity of the landscape, exhibiting no striking features, the absurdity of society becomes all the more obvious.
Although Peter Fettich has been active in photography since 2009, he has not yet been presented with a significant solo exhibition in Ljubljana. After starting his career in photojournalism, he redirected his focus to documentary and artistic photography. He is also one of the most experienced photographers in the field of technique and photographic development, which constantly enables him to research and experiment within the field of analogue photography. His experimental attitude towards the medium is highlighted by the works that make up the central part of the current exhibition: most of the showcased photographs have been made on film tape (super 8), traditionally used for silent movies. The artist treats the tape as a photographic film. But since the negatives are extremely small, every magnification degrades the image, especially at higher magnifications. While this process is not new, Fettich’s reference is not historical research within the medium but the aesthetics of Michael Ackerman’s photographs. Considering the artist’s practice and affinities, such as the love of defects (scratches, dust, visible perforations …), creating contrasts (the tradition of strong contrasts in Japanese and Scandinavian photography), and grainy images, the use of super 8 seems ideal – the grainy structure, the softness of the tonality and the typical transmission of beams of light create an impression of the organic, the nostalgic, the intimate, even the romantic. The sequence and movement of images of the bird in flight, the setting sun, the landscape, etc., are featured in various ways: in some cases, we see all the frames within one image, where they are divided by an uneven, organic vertical, while in others, each frame from the sequence is presented separately, i.e. a certain number of images follows one another on the wall as a series. If, with Muybridge,[1] it was all about a technical exercise with a very clear goal, with Fettich, it is perhaps not so much a technical exercise with a very vague goal. An enormously enlarged, monumental image (which is in no way a common practice for treating such small negatives) creates the impression of monumentality in small formats and deconstructs and abstracts the image.
In addition to the film-tape photographs, there is a part of the exhibition that does not adhere to unification in terms of technical procedures and treatment, format and framing methods but instead includes a selection of photographs that will be included in Fettich’s upcoming artist book and continue along the same narrative. If we began this text with a concept of solitude, let us continue here by stressing that the photos forming this open series were taken during the artist’s walks, even though he primarily does not take these walks to take photos but merely to walk. These images can be read as a result of an inner impulse, in moments when thoughts stop, where the inner mood equalises with the one before it: these photographs can be characterised as psychological self-portraits. The atmosphere that they project is permeated with thinking about one’s mental state, meaning, and end of life; their out-of-focus aspect is like a hazy memory of past experiences that have avoided becoming numb. Does it make sense to persist in the world as it is? Without disregarding such questions, how can we show that solitude can be very pleasant?
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.[2]
Nina Skumavc
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[1] Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic motion studies and early film projection work.
[2] From Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, 1923.
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Peter Fettich (1979, Ljubljana) has been working in photography since 2009. He initially worked as a professional photographer in commercial and sports photography. In 2011, he enrolled in photography studies at the Faculty of Applied Sciences in Ljubljana (VIST), where his photographic interest shifted from primarily photojournalistic to a documentary/artistic approach, and began an active journey into the photographic darkroom. In 2019, he completed a semester at Vraa Hojskole (Denmark), gaining experience in alternative photography techniques under the mentorship of Emil Schild. Since 2020, he has served as a co-founder of the Artard Institute, which also oversees the work and development of the Kela production spaces. Fettich is actively involved in developing photographs, self-publishing and running photography workshops. He has presented his work at solo and group exhibitions at home and abroad. His photo book Rispect the Boul! (2019), was among the »Athens Photo Festival« finalists in 2022.
