You are cordially invited to the opening of Dušan Letnar's photography exhibition entitled Shepherds, which will be held on Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 8 p.m. in the Kamnik House of Culture.
The Shepherds photography series was created over a longer period between 2012 and 2013. It is a series of 12 portraits of local people who graze livestock in a mountain village on Velika Planina nad Kamnik. With the exception of one, they are photographs of elderly husbands and wives who still maintain the tradition of the Velika Planina pastoral community.
All photos were taken with a medium format camera, and the author used color film for some and black and white film for others. Perhaps with this choice, he draws a dividing line between portraits that appear to have been removed in time, as if they were taken decades ago, and those that look more contemporary.
This emphasis is also the key quality of the exhibition. Aiming only at the rich history of the pastoral community on the mountain could quickly sound rather sentimental. Confronting the past with the present introduces new questions into the exhibition, which revolve around the future fate of the pastoral community, its customs and traditions.
Perhaps, for many people, this kind of grazing is just a remnant of the past, another one of the customs too slow for today's speed of the world, which will not survive the change of generations.
In the old days, they drove to the mountain on the feast of St. Peter and Paul (June 29). Today, the main word is the weather. Whether grazing will continue on Velika Planina in the future is in the hands of the younger generations. This is also why the portrait of the young shepherd stands out among them all, and not by chance.
The exhibition can be viewed until November 9, 2015 during the official hours of the Kamnik House of Culture (Monday and Friday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and from Tuesday to Thursday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.).
