When Motion Photography Becomes Poetry by Olga Karlovac

Somewhere beneath the curtains of night, as the snow storm passes by, beyond the doors of time, the night is white. And anything and everything hides the reasons why, above the sky, just there where you are. Elsewhere. Look at these landscape images. Notice how they feel different from typical photography. That's the hill from Elsewhere by Olga Karlovac. A sequence of photos that is pretty unusual even for her. But it shows her mastery of motion photography is not restricted to moving subjects, but is rather a result of how she sees the world. Olga often captures subjects we associate with movement. Maybe not this kind of movement, but still, to see a landscape captured in this way, the movement does something different here. It's not capturing motion, it's creating it. The landscape itself seems to breathe, to shift, to become unstable in a way that mirrors how Olga actually experienced those moments of profound solitude. It's very abstract thought. I was shooting for this part of the book and I was on a hill above the small town and it was incredible, unexpected snowstorm and I was shooting and it just describes the feeling. I was shooting that night and this was the mood that played with it and when I tried to put it in words it kind of fell together with the images from the chapter and it was a very cold snowy night. It makes perfect sense. An artist encounters a mysterious landscape during an unexpected storm, has a profound experience and later finds the words to match the images. The poetry captures the mood, the photographs capture the moment. But Olga usually works very differently. Compare these hill images to her typical street photography. Blurred figures moving through urban spaces. She talks about being patient, walking slowly through the city, waiting for the right moments to appear. She says she never plans her photos, she just walks around and sees what happens. I think 90% what happens in my head is intuitive thing. You just leave all your senses open. You open yourself towards all the surrounding and to everything that happens around you. So when you hear what actually happened that night and look how many strong images came from it, something seems unusual. For someone whose entire philosophy is built around slow, intuitive wandering, this session is remarkably efficient. Those four or five images I've created in within half an hour which is very strange for me. It happened in total darkness where the snow gave just enough light to really create this mood that I felt was completely in line with how I felt. But there's a crucial detail I haven't mentioned. This wasn't planned artistic exploration. Olga was actually at a party when it happened. It's a small hill above a small town where I was and called Pozhega and just a few few old wooden houses and a lot of basically nothing. I had friends in the house. They were having a party but I just left. Think about that choice for a moment. She abandoned warmth, safety and friends to walk into dangerous storm with her camera. That's not following an artistic method. That's following something she couldn't resist. The whole sequence that reminds me on that night that was very special to me because it just intuitively happened and I never expected it. It was I believe the only time when I was shooting there and I've never come back to the area. So many of them ended in the book so it felt special the night. It was intuitive, not planned, not thought through, not part of any artistic vision. It just happened. The productivity that night wasn't strange because it was fast. It was strange because it was pure. No theory, no technique, no artistic philosophy about motion and landscape. Just a person with a camera responding to something that demanded to be photographed. Most people think artists get their ideas first. Then make art to show those ideas. But this work happened differently. Olga felt something pulling her and she followed that feeling without knowing why. Now listen to that poetic passage again. Somewhere beneath the curtains of night as the snow storm passes by beyond the doors of time the night is white and anything and everything hides the reasons why above the sky just there that you are elsewhere she's not describing what she planned to photograph but what it felt like to be pulled into something larger than herself something that hides the reason why therefore the poetry isn't explaining her artistic process it's evidence of abandoning process entirely the words didn't come first but the compulsion to leave warm and safety did therefore everything else the images the poetry the meaning emerged from that inexplicable pool this reveals something fundamental about Olga's approach to photography all her talk about motion and intuition isn't really about technique it's about staying available to those rare instances when something in the world calls you so strongly that you have no choice but to respond her motion filled images don't just show us what the world looks like in movement they show what it feels like to be moved by the world literally pulled out of our plant lives by something we can't quite name because the real artistic statement isn't the poetic text it's the act itself leaving the party walking into the storm and staying present to whatever happens next