Lucia Nimcová
Lucia Nimcová has attracted attention already with her first documentary photographs from the beginning of her studies at the Institute of Creative Photography at the Silesian University in Opava. In her pictures she has always tried to present the world of unique expressions. With a phenomenal interest and honesty she has made photographs of her family and friends on the edge of social documentary and artistic photography, creating her cycles About Myself, America, From the Hospital, just to mention the best known of them. She has often interpolated this documented "personal" reality with insertions of written words and drawings, coloring, blue-toning of black-and-white photos, intentional use of dark tonality or past-expiration photo-papers, or eventually of extracts of texts or poems written under the photos. Sometimes she crossed the borders of the documentary and made pictures from the TV or produced conceptual series. However, she has never truly striven for the social document, nor the narrative or subjective, as was often presented, even though working on those topics and with visual language of those genres. It has always been necessary to approach Lucia Nimcová’s photographs with a much more complex view. Though unique, her pictures are often playful visual glossaries, full of poetic spontaneity and femaleness. So she is definitely not the only one significant author of Slovak photography inclining to the documentary style, but with her photographs she has achieved a respectable and unique status within the Slovak documentary photography.
Women are the traditional topic in the author's photographic interests. She has devoted herself to the fascinating world of women since the year 2001. First she created a conceptual cycle about women in the private worlds of their homes, as she says: "where they live, with problems, they are solving, naked as much as they wanted to reveal themselves". Series of four photos gradually uncovering to us picture of each of the "extraordinary" women, do not reveal any of their problems, but explore, in a gentle way, their own mental world and mainly the relationship: woman - and her partner. Love, misunderstanding, devotion, domestic violence, everything is mixed up in a moment of intimate confrontation of the model and photographer, portrait and naked body, just hinted, without stories and final opinion.
The Slovak women is a result of the project, on which Lucia Nimcová has been working in 2003 as a holder of the grant of the Institute for Public Affairs. During the mercilessly limited time period between announcement of the grant results and presentation of its achievements at the Month of Photography in Bratislava, she has travelled round Slovakia, in order to focus at the woman roaming in the wide range of the offered worlds, somewhere between stereotypes of accepted conventions and typical models of living, interests, lifestyle to be shared, and with her own visions of her destiny.
Author's world of poetic flow, filled with playfulness, need for continued search and relation to the world of the documentary, this time in favor of the project, has become limited to relatively decent and moderate style of color documentary, oriented to the significant main motive and expressive colors, occasionally with poetic light. Most of the pictures were taken in the interior, with the indoor light or even with the flashlight. The photographs of Slovak women are an outline of the eventual approaches, selection of many worlds, that surround women. Lucia Nimcová offers a mosaic of alternative fates of basically a "Central-European" woman, although an urban rather than a rural one, with entirely different social relations, roles and work. Common element of her photographs is an intimacy, perceived in this cycle as the traditional female attribute, in the conventional polarity: man - expansion, outer world and woman - family, private world.
The project Slovak Women, during its realization, was not ruled by the view of the women's status in the structures of the society perceived from the feminist positions, it is above all, an author's intimate and rather sensitive search for the female role in the world and the times "she was born a woman".
Just as the photograph forwards its message not only through what can be seen, but also through what the camera finder cuts out from the surrounding world at the moment of release, the project Slovak Women is not only about the little more than fifty percent of the human population, but it is a real pictorial report about contemporary Slovakia, an expressive inquiry about all of us.
Tomáš Pospěch
Lucia Nimcová (www.luco.sk) Born 11/11/1977 in Humenné, Slovakia. EDUCATION: 1996 - 2003 Institute of Creative Photography, Silesian University, Opava, Czech Republic. 1992 - 1996 Secondary School for Applied Arts, Košice, Slovakia. Grants: 2003 - Institute for Public Affairs, Bratislava, Slovakia - A Pictorial Report on the State of the Country. 2003 - Kulturkontakt, Wien, Austria - Artist in Residence.
Awards: 2002 - Winner, Who is Who, Lidové noviny & Who is Who Agency, Prague, Czech Republic
Individual exhibitions: 2003 Slovakia 003, Month of Photography, Bratislava, Slovakia. 2001 About People and Places, House of Matica Slovenská, Snina, Slovakia. From the Hospital, Gallery Opera Myrona, Ostrava, Czech Republic. About myself, Gallery Vetus Via, Brno, Czech Republic — Przemysl, Poland. 2000 About People and Places, Vihorlat Cultural Centre, Humenné, Slovakia. Cosmic Kids, Small Show Room, Liberec, Czech Republic. About Myself, House of Photography, Poprad, Slovakia — Cafe G+G, Piranha, Czech Republic. 1999 Amerika, Gallery Daleko od Baru, Horní Bečva, Czech Republic.
Group exhibitions: 2003 Local, SCCA, Bratislava, Slovakia. Privat Woman, Month of Photography, Bratislava, Slovakia. Slovakia Through the Lens of Documentary Photographers, House of Photography, Poprad, Slovakia. ITF Internationally, ITF / House of Arts, Opava, Czech republic — Istituto Slovacco, Roma, Italy — Complex Desjardins, Montreal, Canada. Imatra Biennale of Photographic Art, Art Museum, Imatra, Finland. Confrontations, Czech Centre, Kiev, Ukraine. Public and Private, SCCA, Bratislava, Slovakia. Stadt in Sicht, Kunstlerhaus, Wien, Austria. She and Her Heart, House of Photography, Poprad, Slovakia. It is Best with Mum and Dad, Gallery Jána Koniarka, Trnava, Slovakia. 2002 She and Her Heart, G4 Gallery, Cheb, Czech republic. Confrontations, Měsíc ve Dne Gallery, České Budějovice — Prague House of Photography, Prague, Czech Republic. Month of Photography, Artoteka, Bratislava, Slovakia. Czech and Slovak Photography of the 80s and 90s, House of Arts, Bratislava, Slovakia — Museum of Arts, Olomouc, Czech Republic. 2001 Young Slovak Photography, Internationale Fototage Herten, Germany. From the Hospital, M.E.C.C.A., Terezín, Czech Republic. Four Elements, NOD, Praha, Czech Republic. Portraits of Places, Ľvov, Ukraine. 2000 Biennale of Photography, St. Petersbourg, Russia. 1999 Students of ITF, Bratislava, Slovakia.
