Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Conceptual photography »

Point of Departure: Memories are inherited. Not as words, not as stories – but as bodily knowledge, as diffuse weight, as patterns inscribed in gestures, silences, and sensations long before we are able to name them. The photographic series Faded, Not gone examines this quiet transmission: what does a generation carry within itself, without ever having chosen to do so?

Thematic Framework: At the centre of the work lies the phenomenon of transgenerational transmission – those psychological and epigenetic processes through which traumatic experiences of war, loss, and suppression do not end with the generation that lived them, but continue to inscribe themselves into their descendants. The so-called war grandchildren – grandchildren of those who experienced, suffered, or participated in the Second World War – often grew up in households defined by silence. The unspeakable was never told, yet it was felt. It shaped attachment patterns, fears, postures, and life decisions. The series does not ask questions of guilt or innocence. It asks about trace and substance: what remains when the immediate witnesses are gone? What does inherited trauma look like – not as a diagnosis, but as a visual phenomenon?

Photographic Approach: The visual language follows the principle of fading as aesthetic statement. Overexposure, projections, deliberate loss of tonal range, fragmented depth of field, and a reduction to light and dark contrasts (monochrome) translate the subject matter into light and form: what is visible can never be fully grasped. What seems tangible, recedes. Archival material, family objects, bodies, and spaces enter into dialogue – not illustratively, but associatively. The photographs do not claim truth; they circle around a silence.