Borut Peterlin: Father’s Tale
3 November – 1 December 2016
Gallery of the Embassy of Republic of Slovenia, Bratislava in frames Month of Photography festival Bratislava
Slovenian photographer Borut Peterlin will showcase his recent work Father’s Tale which deals with his personal life and events that thoroughly shook his life. The intimism of his photographs is accentuated by the use of technique – the historical process of wet collodion plate.
The Father’s Tale series of photographs has a starting point in the experience from artist’s distant past, i.e. his childhood that he applies to the present. When Peterlin was ten years old he played with fire and accidentally spilled gasoline on his body. He suffered severe injuries and barely survived. The experience was extremely difficult and traumatic for a young boy but in his adult life when he became a father, Peterlin came to see that his own accident must have had more devastating effect on his parents. When he was later faced with changes and ruptures in his personal life, divorcing from his wife after twenty years and moving out of the family house, his fears and delights of being a father came to the forefront of his inner thoughts.
The photographs from the Father’s Tale series are on the first glance almost idyllic images from the family album showing moments of intimate relationships between family members. Peterlin captured significant moments of his/their life frozen in time, the events that do not mean anything to anybody who is not from the circle of this family of four. However, the images obtain completely different, much more uncomfortable and sinister sensation when the full context of the story is revealed. They suddenly become darker, loaded with nostalgia and irreversible memories. They show the inevitable process of constant change, of growing up and getting old, of meeting and parting, of blossoming and withering. That’s life (too).
Borut Peterlin (1974) is a photographer who lives and works in Novo mesto. He graduated at Academy of Fine Arts FAMU in Prague in 1998 and at London College of Printing in 2003. For several years he worked as photographer and photo editor at Mladina magazine, he was the initiator, organiser and programme manager of the Fotopub, festival of documentary photography in Novo mesto, while he is freelance photographer collaborating with number of international agencies. In recent years Peterlin focused on the 19th Century photography techniques, especially on the wet plate collodion, which he fully adopted in his creative work. He lives and works in Novo mesto, Slovenia.