Curator Lara Štrumej, MA, presents a selection from Zora Plešnar's photography series Above the Clouds (1975).

“Photographers have always known the visual and semantic importance of clouds in their photographs. For pictorialist photographers, this atmospheric phenomenon was a must in pastoral scenes; thus e.g. Peter Kocjančič photographed clouds to then incorporate them in his lyrical landscape images. Another Slovene artist, modernist painter and amateur photographer Gojmir Anton Kos, drawn also to photographing the endless sea surface, tended to include some tiny detail in his photos of clouds, such as the tip of a tree or a roof ridge, to indicate the horizon. Zora Plešnar has always seen the physical reality as full of visual revelations (e.g. reflections in puddles), and incidental occurrences in the creative process as new expressive potential (e.g. palimpsests of superimposed images); in this spirit she also embraced the visual experience of a vast expanse of clouds seen during a flight as a creative challenge. The most salient pictures in Plešnar’s series Above the Clouds (1975) are those without any visible edge of the plane window confining the shoreless sea of ethereal clouds. By herself confining the random, ever-changing and infinite fabric of the amorphous white mass in images, the photographer created an aesthetic order of her choice. These photographs are poetic images of a world beyond the physical. Nevertheless, due to the perspective indicating the artist’s viewpoint and thus also some orientation in space, they differ essentially from Alfred Stieglitz’s purely abstract photographs of clouds in his famous Equivalents series (1922−1934), which inevitably offer themselves for comparison. Plešnar took all her photographs on a single occasion and not following any specific program, unlike Stieglitz who spent over a decade pursuing his idea of finding in clouds ‘equivalents’ to his inner states, realizing this idea in more than three hundred photographs taken at various sites across the United States. Nonetheless, also Plešnar’s photographs can be seen as reflections of her mood, or, according to her, as her emotional response to the harmony of forms and structures in the apparent randomness of the manifest world.”