Images & Text By Jon Žagar

Embracing fear

Through explorations of internal landscapes and collective memory, I am searching for my own fears and our collective ones. Darkness is what motivates me and challenges me; it awakens the imagination.

When we find ourselves in the dark, our thoughts begin to race, our vision becomes unreliable, and old feelings of uneasiness and fear arise in us while observing these abstract dark landscapes.

Self-constrain is vital in order to withstand these eerie feelings to prevent yourself from running back into the warm light. For the viewer, who observes my two-dimensional works from a safe distance, I would like to evoke a sense of the uncanny and strange – the kind of feeling we experience while watching a lightning storm from the safety of our shelter.

Works presented are based on the concept of the photographic act of confrontation with the unconscious mind. The starting motive is nature which is then transformed with the camera through a certain artistic idea. In this way it is an integration between a mimetic representation of reality and a morphological transformation of that reality into a new fictitious one. The result is a poetic atmosphere that arises from the solitary night explorations of landscapes. Photography in that sense becomes a means of therapy in overcoming fear and anxiety while encountering the eerie and threatening.

All images and text © Jon Žagar

Edge of Humanity Magazine

Presents

Photography & Philosophy

The freezing of a moment is a magical event. Images can make us feel love, rage and every sensation in between.

Photographers, whether partial or impartial to their subject matter, consume a massive amount of insight. Their participation cannot be substituted nor replicated. The moment is gone! The experiences will live in their minds and those encounters are immortalized in their photographs.

Edge of Humanity Magazine’s ‘Photography & Philosophy’ series will bring together the art and the mind of these fantastic creators.

If you would like to participate, please contact the editor jo@edgeofhumanity.com for more details.