Photography by Branko Čeak / Domen Pal / Jože Maček
This collection of photographs is the result of cooperation between three photographers whose individual approaches are otherwise strongly influenced and limited by the rules of client-oriented photography, most frequently of a promotional nature. While such photography requires substantial knowledge and even more substantial amounts of equipment, its limitations also contribute to growing artistic restlessness within the individual author. Wishing to break free of the shackles that are the client’s expectations and target audiences, the author’s creative juices begin to boil inside him. And alongside them simmer his creative tendencies, his potential and all the “what ifs” and “if onlys”…
Coffee is drunk and tobacco rolled, and eventually all the brainstorming begins to take the shape of a plan. Let us direct all our lights at our city! Let us bring to life the spaces that are invisible to the eyes of the general public, spaces that have been purposefully ignored or can only be observed from certain angles, while other, previously unseen and surprising views of them await us. Our lights are many and the places to direct them at in our city almost innumerable.
And so we first take the lights, used to shining on all manner of glamour and luxury, to illuminate the city’s underworld – its sewerage and water-works that the citizens prefer to keep out of sight and out of mind. Next we head to the city landfill, then acquaint ourselves with new guidelines in reusing written-off items and on we go towards a nuclear reactor and the hydroelectric plant’s generator that has been in use for a century. We peek through the ceiling of the Gallus Hall in Cankarjev dom to observe the organ pipes and soon after find ourselves in the operating theatre at the University Medical Centre, this time around not needing to be put under. And as we journey on our lights reveal countless other secrets of our city.