The Slovene photographer Tomaž Lunder (b. 1955) is an author whose opera shows a great variety in genre. He’s dedicated to portraiture, sometimes quite experimental, especially when portraying friends and acquaintances, while photos of strangers in their natural surroundings reveal something between the grotesque and compassionate. At times it seems as if anthropological passion intervenes with his work and sometimes he treats himself with excursions to the cultural landscape or cookery still-lives. For his latest series, Lunder has chosen a photographically unexploited format, a distinctly narrowed vertical field. He focused on the landscape – the human figure temporarily completely disappeared from his cadre. The photos thus gained more suggestive potential since vertical visual field is recognised in Eastern art as a specific characteristic of landscape painting. Lunder’s photographs are executed without digital manipulations, however – because of the diversity of interplays and reflections on the surfaces of puddles – they visually leave an impression of layered artistic (un-real!) space, while the vertical cut-out adds to an impression of layer fusion. The layers could also be, in the archaeological sense of memory, time layers. With his series The surface of Memory Lunder introduces dimensions well known in painting – detection of relationship between the form and the background as well as time relations.
Nadja Zgonik