Over the past three decades, photography has undergone profound transformations, not only at a technical and technological level but also in the conceptualization of clusters of motives and their mutual relationships. New fields of inquiry have emerged, among them the aesthetics of the banal, augmented as it is with questions of intimacy and identity, memory, mental lightness, the grotesque, the role of the body and its various mutations and transformations, and a vast array of combinations thereof. In short, the common denominator of these shifts appears to be the fact that nothing is untouchable any longer. If we take but one example of a theme most firmly anchored in historical tradition, the landscape, we find that its once frequently idealized and heroic image has now acquired a series of contradictory fragmentations: natural beauty is juxtaposed with the built environment, vitality with territory, and human presence with the consequences of its interventions. The approach to landscape themes is often project-based, broad in scope, and polished down to the smallest detail. Consequently, the individual concepts and variations within this chosen framework are infinite, each deserving of attention and proper interpretation.

Across several previous cycles, Andrej Perko has presented his visions of carefully conceived and convincingly realized photographic segments within the context of nature. For the present exhibition, however, he has selected works from the past five years captured at the highly specific location of Vogršček, a man-made reservoir. He called them Transformations, as the events surrounding this body of water have been quite unusual due to the alternating filling and emptying of the basin. Consequently, the anatomy of this landscape fragment has undergone significant change, a process Perko experienced in an intensely personal way; he effectively internalized the site’s diverse configurations and visualized them in that spirit. Through his photographs, he has gradually put together a story, an associative narrative that demands the viewer’s concentration and both intellectual and emotional participation.

This is, above all, a story of something that once was: a layering of remains that appear and vanish with atmospheric phenomena and, in part, human intervention. There is nothing transcendent in them, nothing conspicuous or inherently attractive; nevertheless, the impact of what Perko’s camera has captured is often staggering. It feels as if we are dealing with a kind of imaginary archaeology: formations shaped by earth, mud, roots, stumps, fallen leaves, stones, branches, grasses, and a whole host of other elements for which we cannot find a name. The atmosphere is sombre, almost apocalyptic, as if these features are the aftermath of an elusive cataclysm – a testament to the transience of all things and man’s inability to escape it. Perko is deeply aware of this, expressing it in his photographs through a dominance of dark tones that emphasize the traces of a vanishing, alienated world, evoking feelings of anxiety in the viewer. Occasional bursts of light forming particular compositions do not extinguish this sense of unease; instead, the associative chains they trigger direct attention toward the experience of the real environment, the world in which we actually exist and whose dilemmas and contradictions we struggle with daily. For an image is never merely what we recognize within it; it always alludes to meanings that we, upon perception, project onto through our personal experience. As we observe the bizarre microcosm revealed by Perko’s photographs, our gaze meets something surprising, unpredictable, and entirely different from what we are accustomed t seeing. We question the reality of the configurations, searching for comparisons with what we know, yet finding none. We are confronted with the mystery of a desolate place that we have not entered and likely never will, for it exists only as a result of the photographer’s reflections and his immersion into something he chose, captured, and decided to show us. These are not shots intended to show what stood before the camera lens at a specific moment; they are there to open a spectrum of the aforementioned emotions, which each viewer experiences in their own way. Their essence lies in the reflection they generate, in the posing of the question: Who are we and where are we going? Perko does not offer us answers; through his images, he merely points us towards the possibility of finding the answers ourselves.

                                                                         Brane Kovič

Andrej Perko was born in 1946. After completing secondary school in Novo mesto, he graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Ljubljana. He later studied at the Ljubljana Faculty of Education (Art Education program).

Between 1968 and 1971, he was a member of the ŠOLT Photo Group. He further developed his artistic education through numerous workshops under the mentorship of Duba Sambolec, Dušan Fišer, Andrej Trobentar, Herman Pivk, Klavdij Sluban, and others.

He works in analog, hybrid, and digital photography, as well as with historical photographic techniques. His work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions both in Slovenia and abroad. His photographs are included in several collections, and he has published seven photography books.

He is a member of DLUSP (Association of Fine Artists of the Slovenian Littoral ), ZUŠL (Association of Artists of Škofja Loka), ZDSLU (Association of Slovene Fine Artists Societies), and the Cabinet of Slovenian Photography.

He lives and works in Vipavski Križ.