Albania’s Journey of Transition and the Photographs of
Jutta Benzenberg
Ahead with the Past / Me të shkuarën, përpara
Autoren: Adrian Klosi, Ingo Schulze
Sprache: Englisch / Albanisch
Format: 28 x 24 cm
ISBN: 978-3-902675-45-3
Preis: 36.00 €
FOTOHOF edition 2010, Vol. 145
Excerpts from the text by Ardian Klosi, July 2010.
Jutta Benzenberg photographed this extraordinary unfinished vessel in its Roskovec shipyard in June 2010. It is planned to have many cabins in the shape of cafés and restaurants, billiard halls and slot-machine casinos, and it will welcome not government delegations and presidents with their pretty aides at their elbows, but representatives of the working and non-working people of the entire country. There will be no need for hundreds and thousands of people to drag it across the mountains, as the poor Peruvians of long ago dragged their ship under the orders of the mad rubber-baron Fitzcarraldo in Werner Herzog’s film. No. Powered by 550 years of resentment stored in Albanian hearts since the wars of Skenderbeg, when we were brutally snatched from Europe, it will proceed under its own steam, making up for lost time, and when the peoples and states of united Europe see this Albanian concrete ship, this industrial dream of the 1960s which has become a reality in the 21st century, they will welcome it with respect.
An old lady smiles at the photographer with this ship in the background. It is hers: her son is turning into reality an idea that has been so many centuries in gestation and now finds expression in this country in so many ways. The projected journey is sometimes a hesitant one, and we are unsure of the itinerary and means of travel. For instance, in the town of Kavaja, about thirty kilometres to the north, the chimney of the old nail and screw factory has been turned into a minaret, with a balcony and the muezzin’s loudspeaker facing east.
I suggested to the photographer the caption “Ahead with the past” because I noticed that in most of her pictures, especially those taken in the last two years, after two decades in which she has handled Albanian themes, the past is constantly present. The country is progressing, of course, and in people’s external appearance you no longer see the same tension and barely suppressed violence as in 1991. That period of chaos and destruction has passed, and it is not common to find the people reduced to skin and bone that Jutta captured in “Albanian Survival” (1993). But the past somehow still grips all the people in this book. Who knows, this may be one of the country’s inherent traits. Most albums of Albanian photos show superb landscapes, or people in clean, colourful, bland and up-to-date environments. But Jutta has caught people in the struggles of their everyday lives, in scenes which bear the marks either of the socialist past or of Albania’s age-old poverty. Some illustrate unsuccessful endeavours to overcome both, in the shape of a newly-acquired kitsch prosperity, with shimmering satin and floating tulle curtains. Sometimes the subjects of these photographs, still in thrall to the past, are not people, but buildings, rooms, railway stations, mining towns, dogs and horses, forests and lakes. Unlike tourist photographers who attempt to exclude every blemish and stain, and all the rubble and debris of the past, Jutta consistently includes these things in her vision, or rather finds them wherever she goes. Are these the struggles of Albania, her fractures and rents, or are they the photographer’s? I cannot tell, and I need not decide this question as long as the photographs speak for themselves.
Several albums of photographs of Albania have been published in recent years. Those produced by Albanians are aimed at tourists, and seem to display the country as if in a shop window, while those by foreigners are generally the result of short visits they have paid to Albania. But Jutta’s work extends across an entire twenty-year period. In October 1991, she took black-and-white photographs in the internees’ villages of Lushnjë, in the former prison of Spaç, and on the roads as the migrants poured toward the Greek border at Kakavija and Kapshtica. Now in 2010 she has compiled this book, which contains mostly photographs from the last two or three years, but which are nevertheless connected to her earlier work. In between, she accomplished work of extraordinary value, with characters, situations, and landscapes that charted the country’s destiny year by year. Tragically, her collection was entirely destroyed by fire in 2007, but she started again, determined to make up what she had lost. The public can see at least a selection of the results in this book.
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