Angelo Božac: Coming Out
Angelo Božac has a list of approximately thirty solo exhibitions behind him, not only in his native Croatia or the Czech Republic where he currently resides, but also in Germany, Japan, Great Britain, Austria, Slovenia, Serbia, Russia and Venezuela. He has participated in 275 exhibitions, received almost 140 different awards, including Helmut Newton and Taschen Publishing House awards. His works have been published in numerous distinguished journals and he has worked in the leading advertising agencies. He is currently working as an associate of the New York agency Corbis SABA Press Photo and the Milan agency Grazia Neri. He was among the first graduates from the Photography Department FAMU in Prague to be admitted to the doctoral studies, not only owing to his high-quality photographs, but because of the his receptive vision for the past and present international photography.
This, by all means, represents a respectable score of the two decades of the artist's achievements in the field of photography. Furthermore, the sole quality of his prolific photographical oeuvre is even more impressive. Already as a student at the Faculty of Pedagogy in Rijeka, he started taking photographs of the landscape and documenting works in the shipyard. It was on the basis of these photographs that he was admitted at FAMU. There he became practically acquainted with all aspects of photography whereas he achieved the best results in the portrait photography. Unlike his colleagues who focused primarily on the social portraits, intimate self-portraits or, symbolically speaking, portraits engagés, Božac produced mostly unconventional portraits of various prominent Czech and Yugoslav directors, actors, musicians or writers. His graduation folio consisted of elaborately composed and technically precisely processed atelier portraits of the PEN Club writers. The folio did not only reveal his sophisticated sense for the image composition achieved by an effective illumination, but also a precise psychological characterization. These photographs were even more important because the contemporary Czech and Croatian photography had never before included more inventive portraits of the celebrities.
Beside portraits, Božac at the same paid special attention to landscapes and documented still shots, nude photographs, advertising and fashion images and theatre photography. The final result of his seven-year cooperation with the Slovenian National Theatre in Maribor is a monumentally designed and outstandingly graphically equipped huge publication Pandur's Theater of Dreams in 1997. It contains dozens of expressive shots showing various mise-en-scene arrangements from the point of view of stage production, stage design and acting. During the past several years Božac has been working on the cycle of his personal documents on Prague depicting already fading Kafkian atmosphere of the Czech capital that reveals unexpected visual metaphors and an almost mystical world on the borderline of reality and chimera.
The current exhibition by Angelo Božac covers two parts of another very prolific cycle of a somewhat seductive title Coming Out. He has been creating the cycle from 1998 by photographing the world of Prague travesty shows, the world of Prague transvestites, transsexuals and drag queens. He was invited to one such shows in Prague by a female acquaintance of his whose friend participated in the show. Božac remembers clearly how he felt: "A fantastically attractive world of the transformation of these men, their feminization, when I saw them on stage, I was fascinated by all of it. But, this did not satisfy me. I wanted to find out more about the participants. I became friends with them and started taking photos in the backstage, talking to them and listening to their adventures." The topic of sex change - on stage or in the atelier - is no exception in the world of photography. It has already appeared in the works of Claude Cahun, Pierre Molinier, Diana Arbus, Anders Petersen, Andy Warhol or Nobuyoshi Araki, whereas from the 1970s, Nan Goldin has continuously worked on this subject. She has lived among the transsexuals and in 1992 her book entitled The Other Side appeared containing photographs of the Boston drag bar of the same title, the footages of New York and Berlin transvestites, and homosexual prostitutes in Manila and Bangkok. Furthermore, FAMU has also presented several documentary collections from travesty shows that have stirred up a considerable interest following the Velvet Revolution in Prague - as a constituent part of life in the free world that has been previously banned and discredited by the communist regime.
Angelo Božac has taken photos of some ten different clubs offering travesty shows not only as a spectator, but as a person whom men performing in colorful female clothes and wigs, wearing heavy make-up, trusted, accepted and confided in by telling him their life stories, feelings, problems and to whom it was allowed to sneak into their closed world behind the scenes of their theatres, clubs and bars. The use of a Leica camera with illuminated lens and a very sensitive Kodak TMZ 3200 film enabled him to work without a flash and remain almost invisible to those who entered into the frame of his camera. This is the reason why his photographs reveal very intimate scenes and why some of them make us feel as if we are actively participating in the events. Documentary footages of Angelo Božac alternate realistic shots with more expressive ones marked by blurred motions, rough texture of the negative lens or a diagonal composition, which is a technique that formally continues the work of William Klein, Louisa Faurer, Mario Giacomelli and other creators of the subjective document. Juxtapositioning of two or more motifs enriching the reality with a new dimension often plays in an important role.
Božac is not really interested in the individual performances of the dancers, actors and singers impersonating Marilyn Monroe, Madonna or some other international celebrities. He is far more interested in the psychological dimension of the change of identity and sex. This is what the artist says about it: "A shy man behind the curtain transforms into a dazzling diva in an instant and I am quite sure that this transformation is more intense in his consciousness that visually. I photograph behavior and relations of the "new man". I want to show the life of travesty as a closed world with all its dramas, sorrow and malice, as well its good moments." If during the communist period, there were men dressed in women's clothes that the majority of the manipulated society condemned and regarded deviant, today, the same men working in travesty shows are often regarded as new entertainers in the show business. Beside, in this way the majority of them really solve their identity problems whereas glamorous performances in women's clothes are not just a way of making money.
Alongside the immediate live photos from the stage performances and behind the scene, the exhibition Coming Out also consists of strenuously arranged and perfectly illuminated portraits of the artists, dancers and singers from the travesty shows. They also mirror two approaches of the author: on the one hand, we have classical static portraits of people looking directly into the lens of a camera which reveals their facial expressions or, in the case of the smaller series of portraits of the same persons, their transformation by wearing different clothes, make-up, wigs; and on the other hand, more dynamically arranged shots on which the portrayed persons make different poses inspired by various celebrities from the world of show business. These portraits also reflect a sharp contrast between the dazzling illusion and reality, whereas the motifs of aging and solitude are much more important than in the documentary photographs.
The collection Coming Out generally reminds of the mission of the famous Australian film Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Like the film, the collection registers openly and shockingly the life of drag queens and transvestites that are often expelled not only from the heterosexual, but also from the homosexual society even though these men are extremely sensitive and, like others, long for happiness, love and friendship. Most of all, photographs of Angel Božac express understanding of otherness, tolerance, human reciprocity, the need for love. And this is by no means insignificant.
Prof. Vladimir Birgus, PhD
English translation by Iva Polak