By Andrija Seifried
I find myself surrounded by the likes of Holly Johnson, Pinkietessa Pinkie, Diane Goldie, and Garry Roost amongst others at the Private View of the latest G O D Photography exhibition, at the Croatian Embassy no less. A very colourful and excited crowd have gathered for this, his first London exhibition of new works in a year, and the promise of a live ‘special performance’ adds to the happy mood here tonight. The photographs, as always, are stunning. Depictions of ‘Hamlet’ performed in Dubrovnik last year are interspersed with beautiful monochrome images of a fairytale city edged with darkness and mystery.
G O D Photography (Bari Goddard) is an artist and photographer who is in love with and immersed in the City of Dubrovnik that has been haunting him since his first visit there.
This exhibition represents the magic around a moment that was stopped in Dubrovnik’s past but in its present as well. Moments in aspic.
Each photograph bears its historical and its theatrical background.
Bari captures not only Dubrovnik, but also the element that binds it, i.e. the element that binds the English artists to “our” and also “their” City which then in turn becomes their scene representing ‘all the world that is the stage’ – this stage being made of stone.
The artist does not capture the City nor the theater in a chronological manner, he rather chooses the specific motifs and people who intrigue him.
It is precisely these selected motifs and details of Dubrovnik that are fascinating due to a special kind of rapture that has been recorded by the “eye of the camera” of this connoisseur of photography who adds an extra dimension to it – the dimension of an artistic approach that is particularly noticeable in the game of black and white surfaces.
These images evoke in me a sense of belonging to a world that is unfamiliar yet close to me and which I observe, as well as the City itself, with a sense of nostalgia. Those are people-actors, the foreigners who feel it and breathe together with it and with us.
The portraits on the photographs are no longer just “characters” from Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies; they are rather becoming part of the City they live with and they are merging with this stone theater.
His photographs, are flies trapped in amber, and if you observe them from any side, they remain unchanged and immortal.
Andrija Seifried