silver gelatin photography, (40x50cm)
A selection of photographs from 1991-2023-(ongoing)
For me, self-portraiture, as a form of self-representation signifies both subject and object, vehicle, and space. All that surrounds me in the moment of taking the picure circles around identity, migration, history and displacement. Being the second generation of immigrants my history starts with my family and my ancestors lived life and experience. I use prop and clothes belonging to my aunt, mother or father. The photographs are from Sweden, former Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro, Germany and England. Places where I travelled to stayed at and where I have found an existential feeling of loss and distance. I investigate a form of exile that for me occurs in the space that surrounds me which is why I put myself in the center of the image, the vantage point is necessary for me when I choose to find position between the camera and the environment. I work intuitively and with a method of pseudo-acting and performance - a kind of staging and documentary photography at the same time. Part of the process is also to find friction and tense between assimilation and resistance to the space and surroundings. - Snežana Vučetić Bohm
‘In 1991, when Snežana Vučetić Bohm was studying at Nordens Fotoskola, she was asked to make a documentary photo reportage. Equipped with a stand, a self timer and a Rolleiflex camera – a classic model for photo journalists – she travelled to Yugoslavia, which was on the brink of civil war. Her choice to work in black and white is also in keeping with a long tradition of photo journalism. But in the midst of the political conflict around her, she turned the camera on herself. Both the tank on the bookshelf in her cousins’ home and the barbed-wire fence in the landscape near her grandmother’s house seem to prophesy the looming war. Vučetić Bohm meets our gaze as both observer and observed, as the human being she is, in a terrifying and incomprehensible situation.’ - text from exhibition catalouge, Moderna Museet, 2022
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excerpt from, *Ethics and Infinity, 1981
Phillippe Nemo: According to war accounts, it is very difficult to kill someone who looks you in the eye.
Emmanuel Levinas: First of all, it is the straightness of the face, its straightforward, defenseless, way of showing itself, the skin of the face is the most naked skin, the most exposed. The most naked although its nudity is decent. And, at the same time, the most exposed. There is in the face an essential poverty, which is proved by trying to mask this poverty by pretending, by looking untroubled. The face is exposed and threatened, as if it invited acts of violence. At the same time, it is the face that forbids us to kill.
*in conversation with philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas and Phillippe Nemo, Ethics and Infinity, 1981
A study for Self Portraits, Gärdet, Sweden, 1991
Self Portrait, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait with my newborn baby, Gärdet, Sweden, 1992
Self Portrait, Serbia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait, Serbia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait, at Bitola Zoo (American Racoon), Macedonia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait, Dalarna, Sweden, 1991
Self Portrait, near the border, Germany, 1991
Self Portrait, outside Berlin, Germany, 1991
Self Portrait, Gärdet, Sweden, 1994
Self Portrait, in bad stockings on my bed with high-heels on, Gärdet, Sweden, 1993
Self Portrait, Gärdet, Sweden, 1993
Self Portrait, tvättstugan/the laundry, Gärdet, Sweden, 1991
Self Portrait, posing in my parents bedroom, Huddinge, Sweden, 1994
Self Portrait, in my parents house, the living-room, Huddinge, Sweden, 1994
Self Portrait, on a hill in a white sleeping-gown, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait at my grandparents home, Serbia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait, infront of “Wall of Nations”, Jugoslawien, commemorating the victims of WWII, Ravensbrück, concentration camp for women and children, Germany, 1991
Self Portrait, Olympiastadium Berlin, Germany, 1991
Self Portrait with my son Ivan holding a wooden horse from Dalarna, Sweden, 1993
Self Portrait, with a newsmap of the war in Yugoslavia from the Swedish Broadcasting Televison, 1991
Self Portrait smoking a cigarette, infront kitchen-stove, Gärdet, Sweden, 1993
Self Portrait in Farsta kolonilott/allotment, standing in high-heels and fashion dress, on the Chinese communist flag, Sweden, 1991
Self Portrait, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait, sleeping on my parents leathersofa, in my parents house where I grew up. Huddinge, Sweden, 1994
Self Portrait, Macedonia, Yugoslavia, 1991
Self Portrait at the kitchen table in my mothers dressing-gown, Huddinge, Sweden, 1993