2022 Aperture Portfolio Prize – Shorlist
Adrien Selbert, The Real Edges
The Real Edges by Adrien Selbert s among the 5 finalists in the running for the Aperture Portfolio Prize 2022. The winner will be announced on May 13, 2022.
The Bosnian war ended 25 years ago and yet the country seems to be plunged into a lethargy where everyone is wandering in their own time and in their beliefs. The dead and the living, the Bosnians, the Serbs and the Croats, the veterans of the conflict and the youth born in its rubble. Bosnia revives old demons, plays with fire. It is no longer war, it is not peace.
How to translate into photography the strange feeling of a time that never ends dying, the muted violence that runs through the country? How to summon the ghosts that stand in the background of the images?
In this sense, this work is a state of time, more than a state of place. The Real Edges is the image of Bosnia today: fragmentary, ghostly, disoriented, vibrant and chaotic at the same time. The photographer takes the bodies as witnesses. Gestures and postures translate the way the country stands, revealing the splintering into myriad communities and beliefs, as if after a blast.
By investing this evanescent territory, it is the very limits of his practice – documentary photography – that Adrien Selbert challenges here.
—
—
