The Guide

Guides for foreign countries and other planets are being published to prepare us for things, we should be interested in, things we should look for and things, which are suitable to be recorded by camera.

The way, informations about more or less distant locations are presented, is based on a long-time stereotype of human perception of things and phenomenons in general. The result is number of books of travels, which – although they come form different places – are basically all the same and whether they refer to Japan, India or Australia, they are always composed acordingly to the same scheme. As confused foreigners, we conform to the given key and search for a catching point we prepared for, according to the guide and we rarely take in other things – or, in the better case, we sense them just by the way, like circumstantial, less important, only coexisting with before arranged aims. Everywhere and always, we look for the „most important“ – the biggest, the oldest, the deepest, the most expensive, the highest. It almost seems as if the human perceptiveness is not able to leave rooted figures from somewhat strange distress of losing our certainty, which emerges form tight connection with reality. And that‘s why we don‘t see what we don‘t expect. We don‘t believe things, that are different and we transform our perception into something known. As s result, everything is in its very nature the same, only the form differs, the contents remaines unchanged, we see the same all over.

The Guide is a series of photographs, in which my approach to perceiving certain locality, world, time segment, is different than the approach, which is rooted in our thinking. Depicted reality, meaning things and phenomenons connected with it, are being chosen and classified according to my own system, which has alone emerged from many impressions, which have affected me during the period spent in foreign country.

The Guide guides us through the country in the form of photographs, they way I instinctively and subjectively sense it. Some of the photographs depict the reality almost a documentary way, another ones are my constructs, whose sense is not clear at the first sight and they began to work only in the context of other photographs. The border between reality and fiction disappears slowly, real and fictive influences each other and the photographs together create certain message and multilayered story. The Guide is not only a subjective record, but individual photographs try to offer more other interpretations in allusion.

This whole project is dedicated to fiction and reality in photograph and its aim is to break the thin line between these two notions and to visually communicate besides these two categories.

Silvie Milková 2005