Branko Lenart Among the Slovenes

“Na cesti lahko šolam svoj pogled in mu dam hrano, ki jo potrebuje - lačni pogled, in moj pogled je nepotešljiv.”—Walker Evans1Photographer Branko Lenart is difficult to categorize. As an artist, Lenart is as prolific as he is curious, and has completed an eclectic range of projects straddling both modern and postmodern philosophies. Lenart discovered photography in his teens and ultimately greatly disappointed his father when he opted for a life as an artist instead of taking over the family textile business. With a career spanning close to fifty years, he helped bring art photography to both Austria and Slovenia and found ways to connect cultural funding from both governments to explore his identity as a Slovene minority in the heart of the Habsburg Empire. With his work, he carved out a unique position as an advocate for the Slovene culture in Styria—the mountainous Austrian province surrounding Graz—as well as a leader in post–World War II photography in Austria.Branko Lenart was born in 1948 in Ptuj, Slovenia (at that time still part of Yugoslavia). His father, a successful merchant, supported the partisan resistance to the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia during World War II but also found himself disillusioned by the communist regime that took power after the war and hoped for a better future in Western Europe. He moved his family to Graz in 1954 and enrolled Branko in kindergarten, at a time when his child was entirely unfamiliar with any language but Slovene. Branko has since lived the majority of his life in his adopted country working as an artist and educator.Despite being six years old when his family moved, Lenart still maintains a strong identification as a Slovene, despite or perhaps because of the discrimination he experienced early in his life (the Slavs were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and such cultural dynamics require feelings of superiority). In the 1980s, the government of Slovenia helped initiate a new cultural organization in Graz called Artikel-VII-Kulturverein für Steiermark/ Kulturno društvo Člen 7 za avstrijsko Štajersko (Article 7 Cultural Organization for Styria), created as an advocacy group for Slovene minorities in Styria. Lenart was a co-founder and eventually served as chair after some of the original leadership was targeted by letter bombs (resulting in one of them losing several fingers). Between 1970 and 1974, Lenart developed his first serious documentary project, looking at Slovenes in Styria,2 eventually published as Styrians in 2009 by Galerie Marenzi in Leibnitz.Styria is largely an agricultural region (at least at the time of Lenart photographing there; tourism has since taken hold) and Lenart was attracted to a quaint and pastoral vision—lovely rolling hills cultivated by humble people representing cultural traditions dating back centuries. The pictures are rendered with an incredible understanding of black-and-white tonalities—open and clear, but with rich and beautiful shades of gray. Everything about the pictures in Styrians appears simple; the strength of the photographs is how Lenart so unapologetically embraced this simplicity, making romantic, peaceful photographs that don’t at all appear saccharine or nostalgic (a common trap for photographers). Lenart saw Styria as representing the last vestiges of Old Europe, with good people living a hard life but still finding its joy. It offers a look at people frozen in time and living as subsistence farmers in cold stone houses, playing music, slaughtering pigs, sharing rakija, and shoveling hay in scenes reminiscent of The Sound of Music. In his introduction to Styrians, famed Slovene poet Aleš Šteger writes that Lenart “ripped the hands off the clock,” an idea I love because it is active, even rebellious, and resists sentimentality.3 In Lenart’s photographs, the Slovenes of Styria appear humble and poor, but rich with traditions, humor, and deep connections to the land and their communities.To illustrate some of the ideas at work in Styrians, I want to look at two photographs, facing pages in the book and both dated 1971. The picture on the left was made in the village of Stübinggraben and focuses on a young girl with pigtails. She fills the bottom of the frame and wears something approaching a grin; her eyes are clearly dark brown (almost black in the photograph). She is the subject of the picture but only a small part of the frame, with the rest of it filled by a group of men, all wearing black suits, rendered just out of focus by the photographer’s choice of a shallow depth of field. The men are towering over the girl, one of them looking a bit drunk and menacing, one as though just approaching manhood, and another a balding, portly patriarch—all of them radiating power. Peering out from behind these men, looking into the camera between their shoulders, is a small group of teenage girls. The picture feels like it captures an important event—a wedding or christening, perhaps—with a generation of powerful-looking men overseeing the culture and opportunities available to this little girl. The teenagers sneaking a look from behind the men emphasizes the role of the girl in the foreground, as if their glance her way presents a knowing sense of what is to come.The picture on the right is from the village St. Pongratzen, and it shows two young boys, one of a similar age as the girl in the previous picture and the other just a few years older. They are standing on a wooden deck, the landscape behind them obscured by heavy fog. Their father is in front them—we only see half his torso, but he is nevertheless pictured as a strong, paternal presence—each boy wearing a wool sweater and hat. The younger of the two seems a little awkward or fearful of the camera but the older one offers an unflinching gaze that makes him appear much more mature than he really is, as if he is revealing a glimpse of the man to come. The older boy is clearly the real subject of the picture: situated between his past (his father) and his future (his younger brother), he appears as a voice of the next generation. The maturity he presents in the photograph makes me feel I can see this boy as a man, and in seeing him this way he appears full of love and strength, capable of supporting the important cultural traditions of work, landscape, and family. The picture from Stübinggraben feels both joyful and edgy, the girl looks comfortable and happy but also swallowed by the more powerful men around her. The picture of the boys is more about strength and independence, showing a youth fully capable of sustaining the values of his people. Looking at these pictures together, I like to think of them as metaphors for how Branko understands the life of Slovenes—proud, successful, independent, and clinging to values sometimes at odds with political and economic realities.These children are beautiful as are all the photographs in Styrians, but the approach to documentary is ultimately not very dynamic. There are many compelling pictures in the book, but it is also easy to see Lenart combing the streets and fields looking for people to pose for his pictures without spending much time interacting with them; too often his subjects are smiling like they were taught to when being photographed and not revealing much about their lives beyond appearances. Just five years after completing these pictures, however, in 1979, Lenart participated in an international symposium on photography in Graz that would change the trajectory of his work. Here he was introduced to American photographers Robert Heinecken and Ralph Gibson, and curator John Szarkowsi, which ultimately resulted in an invitation to participate in the Apeiron Workshops as an international artist in residence. This experience would hugely impact his approach to documentary photography, best illustrated in his second book looking at Slovenia, Yugoslavia, and Old Europe, Krakavče: Istria.Terra (2012).The Apeiron Workshops was a photography program located in Millerton, New York, conceived by Peter Schlessinger in the early 1970s. Developed in the spirit of Nathan Lyons’s Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, Apeiron was a grassroots collective, bringing together many of the best and most iconic American photographers of the 1970s (aka The Golden Age)—Heinecken, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, and Emmet Gowin among them. The idea behind Apeiron was to develop collaborations and tutorials based on the strategies, theories, and techniques of these photographers, a rich environment for anybody but perhaps especially for an ambitious photographer from Yugoslavia.While working with Apeiron in 1980, Lenart used his time to document the life and culture he witnessed in Millerton, a town of just a few thousand in Dutchess County, near the Hudson River. A couple of hours from New York City, it is the perfect gateway between the international urban center and the rural life found in the Catskills. There, Lenhart participated in a three-month residency under Schlessinger, during which time he photographed the daily professional and personal lives of thirty families in Millerton. He traveled with his wife, Fredericke, and in addition to his photographs the two of them collected interviews and field recordings that Fredericke later transcribed and translated into German. This was a remarkable opportunity when you think about it—a Slovene-Austrian photographing the daily lives of American families in small-town, conservative rural America—truly an approach to documentary developed in the vein of Frank.Returning home, Lenart had two new ambitions, to turn his project about Millerton into a book4 and to bring his new photographic strategies back to his homeland. Like he did in New York, Lenart focused on one town, Krkavče, a village of just a few hundred people in Slovenia located in the northern part of the Istrian peninsula on the Adriatic Sea, along the border with Croatia and close to Trieste, Italy. Rather than spending three months photographing thirty families, Lenart photographed ten families over six years, between 1980 and 1986. He pursued the work with the same methodology—including interviews recorded while making the pictures—resulting in a much deeper, richer engagement with the people, and thus a much more dynamic documentary than found in Styrians.Krkavče: Istria.Terra begins with a quote from American photographer Walker Evans, presented in both German and Slovene (as with all the text): “I go to the street for the education of my eye and for the sustenance that the eye needs—the hungry eye, and my eye is hungry.” This sits next to a photograph from 1977, a broken road sign announcing the village, Krkavče. After three introductory essays—by Primož Lampič, curator of photography at the Museum of Architecture in Ljubljana; Aleksander Bassin, an art historian based in Ljubljana; and Salvator Žitko, a journalist with a special interest in Istria and the Adriatic Sea—the book is divided into twenty-six sections organized thematically, each beginning with a quote pulled from one of the interviews Lenart conducted while making the photographs. The opening section, titled “Ambiente, Umgebung: okolica” (“Surroundings”) situates the village within the landscape, offering views of a quaint European village nestled in the hills of Slovenia. The final chapter is a bit of an anomaly but provides an important punctuation to the project as it was photographed in color (the rest of the book is black and white) and was made in 2011; the inclusion of these pictures helps to emphasize a village lost to time. Between these sections, Lenart looks at a community with rich traditions but one struggling to maintain its way of life in an increasingly modernized world.The pictures in Krkavče: Istria.Terra, are made with the same rich black-and-white tones characteristic of Styrians, but the approach is much more penetrating, offering a dynamic representation of people teetering between the past, the present, and an uncertain future. In Styrians, Lenart illustrated a quaint understanding of the rural life of Slovenes, showing people living off the land and sustaining culture traditions dating back hundreds of years, but Krkavče presents a stark social realism of families caught between the old ways and the new, subsistence farmers struggling to maintain life in the industrial era while still under communism. Lenart, however, photographed them with beauty, pride, and respect, adding to the complexity of his documentary work.Each of the sections in the book represents a different theme—religion, relationships with animals and the land, wine cultivation, and the new values of the younger generations among them—and begins with a quote pulled from the collected interviews. By sharing these fragments, we learn more about the struggles of village life; largely an agricultural community profiting from corn, wine, and olive oil, the people in Krkavče suffer from diminishing production, an increasingly competitive market, and pressure to conform to more popular and urban values. Political tensions are also cited, as under the Yugoslav government the people are forced to speak Serbo-Croatian instead of their preferred, traditional language of Slovene. Because Lenart opted to work with a small cross-section of families, there is a cast of characters in Krkavče, selected people who are pictured multiple times and depicted as essential for understanding this time and place, including an older man with a bulbous nose who has clearly had too many rakijas, and a thin man with thick glasses and seemingly a good sense of humor.One of my favorite sections in Krkavče is titled “Fede Glube: vera” (Faith) and begins with a quote that beautifully blends Christian values with communism: “The freedom is so great that one can combine service to the church and one’s job. Anyone who is a good Christian is also a good worker and conscientious towards his employer.”5 The four pictures that follow all illustrate altars or tributes to Jesus Christ. One is a handmade crucifix composed of a small drawing of Christ’s face on a thin sheet of fabric placed above a carved wooden tunic, mounted on a cross. Surrounding the figure are blacksmithing tools, a medieval spear, a halo of barbed wire, a metallic glove, a ladder, a cat-o’-nine-tails, and a few other unidentifiable items. The DIY quality of this tribute is humble but ingratiating; clearly the choice of all the objects is symbolic. The blacksmithing tools are like the hammer and sickle of communism, the ladder is a path to heaven or hell, and the barbed wire and whip are about pain and torture. The last photograph of “Faith” shows a dirty picture of the Virgin Mary hanging next to a sturdy set of chains, both just above a bovine’s ass, again best understood symbolically. Herein lies the brilliance of Lenart’s approach to documentary, rigorous and full of painful realities, but also full of love and humor.To further understand Krkavče, it is important to acknowledge the political environment existing when Lenart made the pictures, between 1980 and 1986. President Josip Broz Tito, the partisan leader who unified Yugoslavia after World War II, died in 1980. With his death, the fabric holding the nation together started to fray, ultimately causing the nation to collapse in the 1990s. This feeling of Slovenia and Yugoslavia in transition permeates the pictures in Krkavče and helps to better explain the tension that defines the community one teetering on the of a new Lenart completed a book photographed in a similar documentary but this time looking more at Yugoslavia as a The book an of the same both organized to Slovene from a better sense for the pictures in I want to look more at independence, to understand what this book as an died in 1980, in the of Yugoslavia it would still another the nation The tensions that would ultimately the of the nation first in in between the and majority in the region resulted in an by which ultimately set the for the of the that In tensions again in to a the was to this and used this to the of over (a remarkable of the values that used to the nation for to out of the the communist leader in Slovenia, found this very and that if the government the of in the same would the rest of to Slovenia and a supporting the in they for the of Slovenia its from Yugoslavia, the in They a from the but this just ten this the in Croatia was much more important and so they Slovenia. 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