CREDO BOX: Portrait-express
CREDO BOX: Portrait-express
A project by Todor Andreevski
October 28 – November 27 2022
Opening October 28, 2022, 6.30 – 8.00 pm.
Credo Bonum Gallery, 2 Slavyanska St., entrance from Benkovski St.
Todor Andreevski is preparing his first Sofia exhibition, presenting a series of photographs in the Credo Box. The works are conceived as a kind of trajectory through the faces and bodies shown, traveling portraits. The artist offers a journey through the various places where the photographs were “captured”, only we do not travel from city to city but rather from character to character. He photographs various characters, anonymous or from a circle of friends, who blend into the landscape, be it urban or in a desolate environment. His models parade in front of the lens and suggest the idea of a deliberate pose, but there are also shots taken in motion without prior preparation.
His interest is focused on the idea of portraying those people who have some sense of shyness, fragility, but at the same time a real desire for attention. When he photographs bodies, he tries to show them in various situations of hardship or vulnerability. They are captured at a precise time, at the moment of their transformation or movement.
Todor is interested when the ordinary, conventional portrait photograph is disrupted by an element that manifests itself in the moment of capture. For example, the young girl who poses with her eyes closed and the shadow of a bouquet, the outline of which is painted on her face, is captured; or the young man whose clothes are delicately decorated by the dry grass. These elements, accidental or not, are decorations that enrich the audience’s view. We are not limited to just being able to contemplate the features of the face or body, but we pay attention to how the character takes into account the environment that surrounds them.
For the Portrait-Express exhibition, Todor insists on the way the works are arranged. These are analog photographs whose film has been developed and then scanned to end up in the form of a digital print. The idea is not only to perceive the small space of Сredo Box as a photo booth, a portrait box, but also to reflect on the photographic process and the photographer’s laboratory.
The process of developing photos involves various chemical reactions that allow the image to appear. We know that in cinema, directors often choose cinema itself as their subject. We are faced with scenes in which there are actors playing the role of actors. Is it possible that it is the same in photography?
With this exhibition, Credo Box invites you to enter a fictitious mini photographic laboratory, where the shiny plexiglas of the frames, as well as the photo immersed in the liquid, are reminiscent of the devices used to create images; while, of course, subject matter remains one of the most prevalent genres in photography: portrait.
