Bitter Life
/5
- Bitter Life
- Gorki život
- 1975-1976
- 5 photo montages, b&w illustration with caption and b&w photograph
- 20,3 × 29,6 cm
The series “Bitter Life” consists of 25 pages that feature captioned photographs from magazine and daily newspaper reports on day-to-day events paired with photographs from Sanja Iveković’s private photo albums. Kontakt owns five of these image-pairs, which question the relevance of written news messages and their influence on the visual material at hand. By juxtaposing private photography with public photographs from everyday press reporting, the artist questions the relationship between the image/text combinations and those moments when the private becomes public yet refrains from claiming authenticity for any particular documentary photographic process. Iveković thus situates herself as persona within the image politics of her country in the 1970s but at the same time refers to the ubiquitous visual tropes used in magazines and newspapers at the time. W.S.