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THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF THE JAK BARUH: A NARRATIVE

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Jak Baruh is an open-air photographer as well. One can write long pages of speculations about how Baruh conceived and took these photographs without ever touching the reality in the mind of the artist. So I preferred to go along the photographs themselves. Instead of inventing a story for Baruh’s photographs, I decided to tell my own stories that his works evoked in me as a viewer.

Perusing pages of his book, first of all, a panorama of a city is revealed: an idiosyncratic New York. Strangely, so few cities of the world are recognized immediately just out of a small detail. New York, this so called global center of the economy has an incredible light creating different possibilities for photographs. Daylight seeping through the backs of skyscrapers soaring to the heaven projects shadows of big masses on the street. Overlapping building images on the mirroring glass surfaces of buildings where the light is projected create fascinating reflections. The permanent dance of the light on buildings’ surfaces changes the aspect of streets together with the motion of the sun in the sky. The coexistence of geometrical forms resulting from shadows, the red building behind, and the perspective of an overpass on which two people chat, creates different visual effects.