Jadranka Ljubičič
BOJAN ŠTOKELJ- Digital Photographs from the series Ljubljana- The Capitol of the land 2000

"Find the daemon in everything."

In the beginning photography was but a naive wish to freeze one's own image for the future memory. This photographic action had nothing to do with art it was but a technical routine. Only a century later, when the latter had been long exceeded, it prove that the use of photography reaches beyonde the mere reflectionof a human face or a landscape.

An unusual fact is that photograph can catch more than the eye. This raises the principal question as to where this non mechanic picture of a moment triggered by the eye of the beholder and the chemistry of the processor creeps in. Photography may create more than reality itself and this is what causes increasing excitement about it.

The "credo" of every photographer was to capture the "decisive moment". In capturing this moment of reality, no means may be a precise and as direct as is the photo camera in the hands of those can see and feel the moment when the principal button of the "maschine" should be pushed. Nowadays, with various computer simulations and digitalisations, this "credo" changes and may create constructed worlds, "the worlds we conceived ourselves and no more the world we were given, as we were given the world surrounding as".

The introduction of new media on the artistic scene already brought belief that photography would become extinct and that the medium would vanish in the digital space. The great potential of digital and virtual images obscured the glamorous history of this medium but for a moment.

Bojan Štokelj is photographer using photography as a medium of discovering reality, hidden beneath the nature of things. The nature becoming an object through which the artists introduces his subjective view. His digital photographs from the series Ljubljana- The capital of the land, taken in 2000, present him again as an artist uncovering the reality hidden beneath the nature of objects. They include the sharpened artist's criticisem towards society, system and the constructed world.
This time the photographer caught in his objective the well-known architectural buildings of the city of Ljubljana such as the Parliamanet, the Franciscan Church, the Ljubljana Castle, the Modern Gallery, Nebotičnik, Metalka store…At first sight this buildings seem like objective photographic records of a city. Close-ups show a detailed image of the chosen objects. At the same time we experience a somehow differnet view. These objects are like maquettes of the city with manieristic models stretched in horizontals and verticals, where the sharpened are an intentional wish of the artist. Equally intentional is the choice of metallic blue green colour giving these objects a morbid, cold and uncomfortable feeling.
The photographer deprived his objects of the soul, we encounter buildings which are empty, cold and almost devoid of belief that they contain life. The city Ljubljana is veiled in the secret of the sight its buildings the ghosts of the city. The sights vanish in foggy backgrounds, in the "sfumato" of unfinished and unclear. This is the world beyond reality, a surrealistic one.
These surrealistic images remind us of the images by De Chirico, one of the fathers of Italian metaphysical painting in early 20th century. His metaphysical worlds are the portraits of isolation of a modern man in an alienated world. Štokelj's world in blue green hues and digitally processed photographs creates a similar feeling of his objects becoming the symbols of an alienated, dehumanised world.