Personals

 by Paula Muhr, photographer 

Published in IMAGO Magazine on the occasion of Katarina Radović's exhibition Personals in Artget Gallery in Belgrade, December 2006 – January 2007

With her series of photographs Personals, Katarina Radović continues to apply the strategy of staged photography, which she has already employed in her previous work Women. Both series have certain characteristics in common: their starting points are images found in her medial surroundings (Internet, TV, magazines), and she uses herself and/or other non-professional actors to play out the (re)constructed scenes. In both cases, the author does not aim at referring to the private personae presented in the photographs or at disclosing their individual characters, but rather uses them as performers who enact general models of (frivolous) behavior to which she wants to draw the viewer’s attention.

In Women, she questions the ideological connotation of such images of women as are predominantly present in the mass media, by talking up the roles of various imaginary characters in front of the camera. In Personals, she directs her attention on “the phenomenon of self-advertisement – those people who send images of themselves to magazines or Internet sites, in the hope of finding a suitable partner” (K.R.). By staging fictional scenes in which she slightly exaggerates, and thereby parodies, the phenomena she presents, she uncovers their banality and yet also invests them with humour. Her images cannot be treated as a detached criticism of the consumer society in which even personal relationships became a commodity, although they do not exclude such references. She points to the stereotypes which impregnate and inform our everyday lives, yet brings it to the point where her images become affirmative in their comical potential – they represent human fragility and folly, which could be laughed at, but also emphatised with.

In addition to indicating sociological and psychological aspects of this specific contemporary form of looking for partners, Radović also raises the question of the ‘ideal’ portrait – or, rather of how one identifies with one’s image. The point of self-advertising lies in using the most representative image of oneself. As this image should function as an incentive for a potential future lover to enter into communication with one, it should be the one which, in the view of the portrayed individual, captures his or her most attractive and appealing features. Also, such an image, either especially made for this purpose, or chosen from the ‘archive’ of personal snapshots, expresses how the one portrayed wishes to be perceived by others. However, what remains open is how different viewers react to such images, i.e., how they read them. By staging her series of fictive personal ads, Radović investigates this very gap between the unconscious aspirations of average ‘advertisers’, which she so cleverly brings to expression in the images, and their surface appearances, which is often in collision with the viewer’s expectations. Radović plays with and parodies the spectrum of culturally coded models of representations of the desirable (and desiring) subject. Yet, her carefully staged images, with all the appropriate settings, props and costumes, retain a certain offbeat quality, resembling casual snapshots, which makes them even more poignant and attractive on the visual level.