Fran Krašovec
Dejan Habicht
Matjaž Wenzel

Bias – or more precisely, the bias of the gaze – is the most succinct way of describing the realizations stemming from the reflections and insights related to the series of photographs It’s Important What Your Eyes See (Bitno je što vaše oči vide), which is a sequel to my recent work Exercises in Style (2019–2021), where I grappled with the nature of the photographic medium and visual culture in the context of various factors determining the ways individual perceive and consume images and my own role (and guilt) in this system.

As Miroslav Karić observes in his text for the catalogue, “[T]he absurdity of the situation has led [me] to consider [my] own position as an active contributor to the production of images and participant in the perpetuation of established visual codes and formulas that maintain the status quo in the endless flow of perceptual sensations, this dramatic complicating of our visual horizon. What it is that our eyes ultimately see is presented as a sobering distance in a group of photographic works featuring views of pieces of architecture from [my] immediate environment, marked by both ordinary and bizarre human interventions that further confound our view and understanding or, conversely, make us indifferent because our eyes have become accustomed to such situations.”

The biased gaze, preconditioned with learned predictability (the technical laws of photography plus the pertinent theory), has thus also guided my selection of photographs from Moderna galerija’s collection. They are photographs I would most likely have also taken myself had I found myself there – in/before their situations. The desire-need-purpose would have dictated the choice of camera, and that would have in turn determined the presentation or distribution of the images. This, however, wouldn’t be enough for the viewers to understand. Without a context defined by a title, caption or text, the selected photographs seem virtually identical. Always the same. Photographs that could, to paraphrase John Berger, go with any story one chose to invent. *

* John Berger and Jean Mohr, Another Way of Telling (Pantheon, 1982), p. 89.