2002–2003
photo series

Residents, 120 × 170 cm
Cyclists II, 120 × 180 cm
Che. Next Shot, 120 × 150 cm
Nepal, 120 × 180 cm
Defeat in a Cross-Country Race, 120 × 180 cm

Libera’s exhibited works analyse the importance of media and image in mass culture. In Positives, his series of photographs of war and destruction, he uses famous photographs of war and destruction as ‘negatives’ to the ‘positives’ he directs: soldiers do not lay out Che Guevara’s body (Freddy Alborta Trigo: Che Guevara Dead, 10 October 1967), but give a light to a man smoking a cigar lying on the ground (Che. Next Shot); we see cyclists (Cyclists II) about to take down a barrier, not German soldiers invading Poland in WWII (on 1 September 1939 German soldiers dismantled the border barrier at Sopot, Poland); we focus on tourists running along the beach (Nepal), not on children fleeing the bombing of Vietnam (Nick Ut: The Terror of War, 8 June 1972); and we see tired racers (Defeat in a Cross-Country Race), not the family members in Baltermants’ harrowing photograph trying to identify their fallen relatives (Dmitrij Baltermants: Grief, Searching for the Loved Ones at Kerch in 1942). Libera’s photograph Residents shows smiling figures in striped costumes instead of concentration camp prisoners behind the barbed wire fence. This is not the world-famous photograph published in the 7 May 1945 issue of Life magazine (Margaret Bourke-White: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945), one of the most harrowing photographs of the Holocaust, which captures both the barbarity of Nazi rule and the strength of the prisoners who survived the forced labour and brutality. Compared to the originals, his works are not only horrific, but everything about them is strangely inverted. What at first glance seems familiar and dramatic may at the next moment appear to be somewhat more positive, or even dissolve as an ambivalent element.

Libera deliberately chooses themes and approaches that fundamentally question what seem to be commonplace, established social practices. His works confront us with the conventions and codes of mass culture, critically analysing and sometimes ridiculing them. At the same time, the artist stresses that his objects are intended to “educate”. The most famous of his creations, and the most scandalous, is LEGO Concentration Camp (1996), which contains the Lego sets needed to build a concentration camp. The work caused a huge media sensation, but it undoubtedly highlighted fundamental questions about the contradictions of western culture, such as marketing manipulation, the potential for violence in children’s toys, and the controllable and controlled role of memory in culture.[1]

Perhaps even more broadly, he explores the connection between the medial relations of images/photographs and memory in his series of photographs titled Positives. In the discourse of memory politics, images tend to play two roles: reminder images point to events and places of the past and help to maintain social memory, while memory images are visual expressions of narratives about past events that affect people’s memories and identities. They thus play an important role in both preserving memories and shaping memory. In terms of memory, images preserve memory and allow people to learn about the past, and can therefore be an important source of memory. At the same time, images play a key role in shaping memory, allowing us to shape our identity and the narrative of society. According to Nora, images are usually part of official memory politics, which are often manipulated and used to achieve political goals.[2] [3] At the same time, the meaning of images depends on the context of the community or culture and personal experiences, but mass use results in images or symbols losing their original meaning and their ability to influence people, or as Vilém Flusser puts it, “imagination turns into hallucination”.[4]

The main reason for this emptying out of images, according to Baudrillard, is that in modern society, values and meanings are no longer linked to the original, material reality, but become simulacra that feed on themselves and create their own referents. Simulacra are experiences and illusions created and disseminated by society that appear real and meaningful but are in fact devoid of meaning. Thus, simulacra are nothing more than undecidable referential virtualities that are present in the everyday life of modern society. In the world created by simulacra, it is no longer the values and meanings that are important, but their simulacra and the experiences and feelings they create, so that the emptying out of values and meanings increases. The simulacra create the illusion that society is happy and valuable, but in reality, they deprive people’s lives and the reality of the world of truth and realness. The visual prevalence of simulacra is also referred to by Roland Barthes, who argues that developed societies are now characterised by the consumption of images rather than beliefs. According to Barthes, everything is transformed into an image; images are all that exists, all that is produced, all that is consumed, and this completely deprives the human world of conflicts and of any desire for its real content on the pretext of presenting it.[5]

Libera uses the term “deceptive appearance” to describe his work, because if we look closely at his photographs, our assumptions about what we see become increasingly questionable; his versions of the images are somehow deeply disturbing. To the insufficiently careful viewer, it may not even be apparent that we are not dealing with the well-known, world-famous press photographs, but with their doctored versions, whose meaning can only be revealed under more thorough scrutiny. Libera forces us to redefine the role of the images he creates, to shed our routines and force ourselves to question the medial conditions and meaning-bearing functions of the images. Press photographs that have become empty simulacra, boringly repetitive, self-serving and communicating their own references, become part of reality again through Libera’s subtle reversal and critique. At first glance, it is a grotesque, critical series, yet its pieces are more real than the original icons, once dramatic but now empty. Through this extreme modal shift, by repositioning ‘tragedy/reality’ as ‘comedy/fiction’, he shines a light on this emptiness and at the same time gives it new meaning. Trauma and its representation are presented in a new configuration. One of the propositions of Libera’s series is that the effects of trauma cannot be fully presented (represented) but can only appear in our imagination as ghost images, as viewers recall the original versions of the re-enacted photographs. In this way, these images truly become part of the collective consciousness, and thus perhaps the dramatic quote in the 1960 anniversary edition of Margaret Bourke-White’s photo series in Life magazine takes on a special meaning: “Dead men will have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them”.[6]

[1]    https://culture.pl/en/artist/zbigniew-libera

[2]    Nora, Pierre: Emlékezet és történelem között – Válogatott tanulmányok, Napvilág Kiadó, ford. Haas, Lídia – K. Horváth, Zsolt – Lajtai, L. László – Németh, Orsolya – Tóth, Réka, 2010, p. 408.

[3]    K. Horváth, Zsolt: Az eltűnt emlékezet nyomában, Pierre Nora és a történeti emlékezetkutatás francia látképe. https://epa.oszk.hu/00800/00861/00012/99-3-9.html

[4]    Flusser, Vilém: Towards a Philosophy of Photography, trans. Mathews, Anthony, Reaktion Books, 2000.

[5]    Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida, trans. Howard, Richard, Hill and Wang, 1982, 118–119.

[6]    in: Life: Atrocities, 244, 7 May 1945.