Igor Manko
Visual Discoveries
image: Igor Manko from the Beer Drinkers
About This Exhibition
Igor Manko was born in Poltava, Ukraine in 1962. In the 1980s he studied photography and became a member of the National Union of Art Photographers of Ukraine. (The NUAPU started in 1989) After studies in linguistics he became the director of the International House Language Center in Kharkov, Ukraine.
Born in 1962 Igor grew up under soviet style socialism and the realities of life in Eastern Europe. (The Ukraine gained independence in 1991) Photographers were held under suspect by the KGB, and at times by community members. Anyone with a camera was suspect. To develop as a “fine art photographer” (a phrase that can be debated) in these conditions was at least challenging, and at most dangerous. (Refer to the interview with Igor)
Emerging out of this time of struggle and change photographers who worked to move beyond the reportage, documentary, camera as recorder of reality, to using the photograph to explore inner and outer responses to their world; seeing the image as a language, considering its signification and emblematic placement in respect to other images. It is within this context that the work of Igor Manko develops. Manko sees art photography as a language, fluid in time, and poetic in nature. He states in his exhibition statement his thinking on fine art photography:
“In search of a new pictorial reality, fine art photography aspires to overcome the triviality of its documentary nature. In an artistic photographic image its elements are carefully selected and arranged to create the desired pictorial effect. It can be said that the language of art photography is a secondary language, like the language of poetry, which manipulates the ordinary language to achieve poetical expression, carefully selecting and arranging words according to rhythm, meter and rhymes.”
Photography, if understood as a language, needs to be fluid, more than a series or a set of individual images, but designed and presented as a sequence that refers to the past as well as to the future, building and defining the concept or intention of the image-maker. It is here that the reader of the visual text needs to extend the time and effort to look beyond words to concepts and ideas that form the expression of the image-maker and the meaning construction of the viewer/reader. It is the paradigmatic and syntagmatic structure of the sequence that begins to define the visual language of photography.
The VASA exhibition of Igor Manko’s work needs to be understood in its social and historical contextual framework. Photographs, as Manko suggests, move beyond the recording of reality to the expression of ideas.
This exhibition presents his work in various formats, provides a conversation, and an essay by Guennadi Maslov.
© Roberto Muffoletto, 2013
All material, text and image, are under ©