AMBIENCE XVI

Zmago Jeraj​

1937, Ljubljana, Slovenia

From the Carnival Figures series, 1973–1996

b/w photograph, silver gelatin print

Zmago Jeraj’s series of carnival-themed photographs spans thirty years. The earliest shots were taken at random, merely for the artist’s personal archive, without any intention of exhibiting them. Moreover, the initially opportune motif was not seen as potentially worthy of sustained creative interest.

However, over time the number of pictures of figures and scenes related to the carnival grew and evolved into a series. A majority of the shots were taken in the Slovene town of Ptuj, famous for its carnival parade and for unique carnival figure of kurent and its companions. After 1984, when a carnival festival also began to be organized in Maribor, Jeraj started chronicling the events in both towns. His focus was on masked figures appearing alone or isolated in crowds of ordinarily dressed people, or on small groups of costumed figures accompanied by random companions. He was interested in homemade costumes, often clumsily fashioned and clearly indicative of the person’s degree of inventiveness, dexterity, and finances. Although Jeraj creates his visual reality with his choice of the event and the moment of freezing it in time, his photographic series is not without traits of reportage photography and its verism. The fringes of the Ptuj center, with run down industrial buildings, provide a suitable setting for these images. The emphasis on the banality of the setting deprives the carnival figures of their power and creates the semantic concept prevalent in the entire Carnival Figures series, aiming to degrade the figures’ spectacularity in various ways. It is thus expressed only with vague allusions to the marginal significance of the costume in relation to the prosaic whole, which underscores the pointlessness of the figure being there