The experimental analog photographs of Dóra Kontha’s album entitled Dreamscapes are filled with personal memories, sensations, and emotions belonging to different physical places.
Photography most often serves to capture reality, to reproduce a given thing as faithfully as possible. But it can also be used to create scenes that never existed, which is often an inner vision that is represented through contact with the outside world. Dóra Kontha captured beautiful landscapes with expired film, and when she couldn’t travel, she developed film negatives using chemicals. With the use of these techniques, the photos together form a dream-like journey through which we can go from the real world to our inner realm.
The pictures are accompanied by art historian and curator Claudia Küssel’s texts: “Dóra Kontha’s work brings together different photographic approaches that have their origins in analog applications. Besides taking photographs of remote northern landscapes, she experiments with a variety of processes in the darkroom. She embraces chance by relinquishing control over the final result, adding an extra dimension. The result and the aesthetics produced are like a generous gift from the medium. The publication Dreamscapes unites Dóra Kontha’s inner and outer landscapes. The photographs presented, which contain various kinds of mutual tensions and contradictions, are combined on the pages with extreme care for color and form. In fact, they create new images, making the landscapes and abstracts almost interchangeable. With the parallel representations of these subjective realities, Kontha celebrates the potential of analog photography, but perhaps even more, the power of the imagination.”
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