Artist Talk - Gabriela Bulisova

Gabriela Bulisova’s art exhibition and lecture helped me to find an intimate connection to her photography, which was great after having taken a class with her and received so much of her input into our own photographic work. I appreciated being able to see so much of her work blown up on the walls and in her presentation, as I’d only seen three or four of her images in her class. I loved her use of primarily black and white images in the exhibition, with some color images included in just the right places. I also really liked the large multi-image prints on the two brick columns, with selected images expanded on the wall next to them, giving the impression of the darkroom developing and image selecting process, achieved through image enlargement.

In her lecture, Gabriela gave detailed and intimate accounts of her interactions with refugees and victims of warfare in Iraq while presenting her amazing portraits of them. She was very emotionally connected to her subjects and the experiences she had learning about their lives, and never rushed through an account, showing the audience the importance of their stories and how they can’t simply be condensed into a few minutes of explanation. They are stories most Americans usually ignore despite our country’s prevailing influence in the war. This was even more evident in her request to take more than the allotted time to discuss their stories, which the audience was obviously okay with and wanted to hear. Their lives and hardships were evident in her style of documentary photography, as she conveyed ruins, the conditions of poverty, and physical injuries while talking about the more psychological ones. I liked that Gabriela talked about the processes of documentary photographing, and how she was often limited in what she could photograph, but got around it if she could.

The film at the end of the lecture of the audio clips from women in the United States who have emerged from the prison system was also incredibly potent. It was really awesome that she showed us a “work in progress,” and even asked our input regarding it at the end of the lecture. This seems like it is going to develop into a very socially important project, considering the hostility of a large part of our nation, especially in aspects such as the job market, towards previously incarcerated individuals. Gabriela’s work conveys some very valuable social messages using the medium of striking photographs. I think that for the purpose of documentary photography, her color images create more of a connection with their audience, because they are more directly tied to reality. Her black and white images in the exhibition tended to be more abstract, while the color images in her projection were often more directly portraiture and life story-focused.

Although this isn’t related to Gabriela’s recent visit, her lecture reminded me of when I was taking her class and we went on a field trip to see Edward Burtynsky’s images of the drilling and manufacturing damage by the oil industry. During this field trip to see a documentary-style exhibition, we also got to see a presentation by several of the members of Metro Collective, the group of photographers in the DC area of which Gabriela is a part. All of the photographers whose work we saw involved documentary photography and social problems throughout the world. It was really great to see their different aesthetic styles for conveying the stories of these people and places, and to hear about all of the challenges of documentary photography. We didn’t see much of Gabriela’s work during this visit, and heard mostly from the other photographers, so finally seeing and hearing her talk about her work was a great experience.