Image transfers
Pyongyang-Vienna. Luca Faccio The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a country of which hardly any pictures exist – except for the official ones. Its picture in the rest of the world is a propaganda picture of one of the last regimes of Stalinist vintage. For the photographer, Luca Faccio, who has been living in Vienna for a number of years, it was a challenge to try to break through this barrier. In 2005, after three years of insisting, he succeeded in obtaining a travel visa for a two-week tour accompanied by an official guide. The pictures he brought back were impressive. Even if the motifs could not be selected freely, the photographer's subjective gaze extended much further than the official one. A follow-up project emerged from the pictures he collected in the form of photo workshops for North Korean students in Vienna, further trips to the land of the "ever-lasting president Kim Il Sung", an exhibition in Pyongyang – the first of a western photo artist – and in Vienna.
Luca Faccio's photographs for the Month of Photography were created in 2006. They document monuments, staged scenes, people as masses – and they portray individuals from close up, at work, on a walk, during a parade. These "private" shots were shown in Pyongyang – not without prior resistance by the authorities: "...the photographs were supposed to show the two heads of state, the monuments - not the people...“.
Image transfers, addresses the possibilities and limits of photographic pictorial practice from a divergent perspective of (global) realities and their conflicts, at a removed distance from the tectonics of the mass media.
Barbara Pichler