
Evgen Bavcar დაიბადა 1946 წელს სლოვენიაში.
მან დაკარგა მხედვედველობა ჯერ კიდევ 12 წლამდე.
ოთხი წლის შემდეგ კი პირველად აიღო ფოტო აპარატი ხელში, როდესაც იმ გოგონას გადაუღო რომელიც უყვარდა

Self-portrait leaning

Why would a blind man want to wear transparent eyeglasses? Why would he wish to walk the streets of Paris dressed in the same black hat, cape and red scarf worn by Aristide Bruant as depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec? Why would he want to risk speaking on a radio program about paintings which he has never actually seen? And why would he desire to take photographs? The name of this man is Evgen Bavcar ("E-oo-gen Ba-oo-char"), he is an art photographer and he is completely blind. Born in 1946 in a small Slovenian town near Venice, he lost both eyes before he was twelve in two consecutive accidents. Four years later, he lay his hands on a camera for the first time, to take a snapshot of the girl with whom he was in love: as he recalls, The pleasure I felt then resulted from my having robbed and fixed on a film something that did not belong to me, I secretly discovered I could possess something that I could not see. Bavcar studied History at the University of Ljubljana, and Philosophy at the Sorbonne. Having settled in Paris he embarked on an academic career, and intensified his photographic activities. In 1988 he was named Official Photographer of the City of Light’s Photography Month. Since then his work has been widely exhibited, particularly in Europe. Walter Aue, the acclaimed Berlin poet, considers that after Niepce, Fox Talbot and Daguerre, Bavcar is "the fourth inventor of photography". Bavcar’s work addresses the relations between vision, blindness and invisibility: My task is the reunion of the visible and the invisible worlds, photography allows me to pervert the established method of perception amongst those who see and those who don’t. He carves out most of his images from the dark of night with the help of portable lights, the better to control all visual parameters: Each photo I create must be perfectly ordered in my head before I shoot. I hold the camera to my mouth in order to photograph those I speak to. Autofocus helps me, but I can manage on my own: it is simple, my hands measure the distance and the rest is achieved by the desire for images that inhabits me. Although he requires assistance to produce his icons (traditionally, icons are representations of the invisible) he is no mere intellectual author, for he concerns himself even with the simplest technical details. Whilst shooting, the philosopher-photographer favors the guidance of children, and he likes to review his results on the basis of various verbal descriptions. He explains: I feel very close to those who don’t consider photography as a ‘slice’ of reality, but rather as a conceptual structure, a synthetic form of pictorial language, even a suprematist image like Malevich’s black square. The direction I have taken is closer to a photographer like Man Ray, than to forms like reportage, which is like shooting an arrow towards a fixed moment.

(ფოტოს სათაური)Shot against time
I'm photography´s degree zero. Let's say that I'm more of an iconographer than a photographer. I've met blind people who also take photographs but never as self-consciously as I do. Some of them even do it with the hope of seeing again some day.
I photograph what I imagine, you could say I'm a bit like Don Quijote. The originals are inside my head. It is a matter of creating a mental image, the physical record which best represents the work of what is imagined.
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Slovenian landscape
My childhood world was one of light and eternity. Everything comes from there. I try to salvage everything I can from my homeland. Family album photos are my favorite. When a friend described El Greco's paintings to me, light and colors are what I remember from my childhood. For me fluorescence will always be light shining on water, the reflections I saw. I have to go back to my country often to refresh my palette.
When I go back to my hometown I touch the trees or the bottom of walls to feel the passage of time. But what's most important is what goes on in my head, what I imagine. It's what I call the gaze of the third eye.

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Ljubljana with the dragon

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ესეც ავტო


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Masks in Venice



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Umberto Eco

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The Eiffel Tower, Paris
When I got to Paris I went up the Eiffel Tower close to forty times. I touched its structure until I became familiar with it, and I made my own image of the Tower documenting it in the multiple photographs I've made in Paris. In my photos I try to destroy one image with another that I consider more real.

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Véronique and the duck

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Portrait with paintings
Having a need for images amounts to creating an internal mirror, in other words, a speculum mundi which expresses our attitude towards the reality that lies outside our body. The desire for images is consequently the work of our interior which consists of creating, based on each one of our valid points of view, a possible and acceptable object for our memory. We can only see what we know: there is no vision beyond my knowledge. The desire for images resides in the anticipation of our memory and in the optic instinct which seeks to appropriate the world's splendor - its light and darkness.

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Geneva with the eagle
I depend on others to make my photos. They have to describe the landscape or whatever is in front of me. Other people tell me what they see and I act accordingly. I pick my photos on a contact sheet the same way as everyone else does, the only exception being that I have to control the physical gaze of those who serve as mediators between the contacts and my own inner reality.

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Self-portrait
I could even give technical hints to camera manufacturers, especially regarding the making of tools for people who're blind or whose vision is impaired. The lack of certain technical tools, like a phonic or talking light meter, has forced me to come up with personal solutions that give me a greater degree of autonomy and independence in the dark.
