Installation ‘As we gathered and watched, we were happy again’
ISSP Gallery, Rīga Photography Biennial, 5.07. – 16.08.2024.
Highlights of the intersection between a documentary approach and the poetry of montage, illuminates the road as part of the Latvian landscape through the legacy of photographer, cinematographer, and director Uldis Brauns (1932 – 2017). Through well-recognized as one of the pioneers of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Cinema, Brauns’ post-war record of the Latvian countryside in humanistic photography remains underexplored. Brauns stated that for him, photography is the foundation of cinema. The choice of filming locations for his only feature film, Motorcycle Summer (1975), was also informed by his personal archive of photographs.
The motorcycle as an object carries cultural and socio-political meaning, as well as subjective associantions. As the most accessible motorized vehicle in the economic hierachy of post-war Latvia, it became Brauns’ instrument alongside the Leica camera even before his studies in cinematography. A starting point for a liberated view of landscape and environment, the motorcycle provided an opportunity to move around, observe, and capture life that did not conform to the optimistic facade of Soviet photojournalism. Brauns’ work combines anthropological interest with aeshetic scope—rather than simply reflecting reality, he selects, collects, and structures it, later adapting or reconstructing it in his own work. Brauns’ emotional, nationally inclined portrayal of memories and landscapes has become part of regional identity. Some of his photographs were published several decades later in the 1989 photography book The Land Remembers (Zeme atceras).
5.07. – 16.08.2024.
Duo show – in converstion with Konstantins Žukovs project.
Curator: Liāna Ivete Žilde
Scenography: Liene Pavlovska
Project producer: Kamilla Kūna
Exhibition view photography: Annemarija Gulbe
Exhibition cycle is as part of the @rigaphotographybiennial 2024.
ANNEMARIJA GULBE 