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Tom Georgiev shot me. Not literally, of course, yet, with a weapon as
formidable as any gun: his camera. He was asked by The Sunday Times to take my
portrait for an article about
narcissism, one of my
fields of interest.
The photographer's worst enemy is his ego. A good photographer needs to learn
to step aside, fade, as it were, and let the confluences of imagery and
circumstance do the talking through his lens. It, therefore, impressed me that
Tom was willing - eager, even - to suspend his preconceptions and consider
some of my ideas for locations and staging.
Tom was wide open to me, as his subject, and to the world. Throughout our
session, with amazing panache and lightning speed, he incorporated into his
work elements from kaleidoscopic street scenes: overpasses, railway stations,
cars, peeling posters, glazed windowpanes, rickety, abandoned furniture, and
even a donkey made it into his photos. He captured the essence of all these
objects - their uniqueness - as well as their interconnectedness. He leveraged
these instant, serendipitous, and fortuitous assets and molded them into
artifacts and art pieces.
Indeed, this is Tom's forte: his ability to use angles, designs, height
differentials, gradients - the shifting geometries offered by his (mostly
urban) locales - to highlight and point out the quiddity of his topic and
subject matter. By combining the mundane (e.g., objects such as bicycles) with
the abstract, the human with the mechanic, the emotive with the geometrical,
Tom succeeds to convey irony without malice, insight devoid of cynicism, sad
love without bathos. He is a poet that knowingly subjects himself to the
rigorous discipline of the scientist.
Confronted with Tom's photos, I am always left breathless by their implied
audacity and deep penetration. "How haven't I noticed this before?" - I gasp -
"This is so obvious!". Or: "This is so true ... and, yet ... impossible!".
Tom's work suggests occult undercurrents that bind Man, his environment (both
natural and artificial), his inner landscape, and Others. His oeuvre is never
surrealistic, fantastic, or naive - but always magical, an enchanted
commentary, an annotated introduction to the ineluctable absurdity of our
existence.
Still, all these attributes would have been of little use without Tom's
incredible sense of timing. Tom resonates with the dynamics of man-made
events, with the flow of traffic, with the shimmering air, with the flickering
of reflections. He is enamored with motion and with what it reveals about the
inner nature of the world around him. His relationship with time itself is
intimate: he freezes, sniffing it, and then, like a well-honed predator, he
traps the moment with his clucking shutter, triumphantly displaying his
spoils, framed and vibrant.
Tom is arguably the best-known press photographer in Macedonia. With his
ubiquitous camera, he is responsible for many by now iconic images.
Inevitably, his oft-awarded work, aided and abetted by that great leveler of
fields, the Internet, is now becoming known throughout the world. He continues
the proud tradition of photojournalists who were and are also perceptive and
prodigious artists. Equally fluent in color and in black and white, he
transforms reality into art with well-timed and well-chosen clicks of his
apparatus.
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