At the very start of summer, the Office for Photography launched a long-awaited (and quietly prepared) new publishing project – a magazine titled FOTOTXT! This periodical, spread across some sixty pages, brings together written and visual materials with the aim of researching, interpreting, and contextualizing artistic work in the medium of photography. As the editorial of the first issue points out, photography here is understood as a “social practice – active and anything but innocent, as it changes our perception and shapes our understanding of relationships.”

The debut issue of FOTOTXT was published on the occasion of the exhibition Máj/My by German artist Stephanie Kiwitt, presented at Spot Gallery until July 19 and again after the summer break, from August 26 to 30. The issue features an extensive interview with Kiwitt, who documents the impact of shifting economic relations on the lives and everyday reality of a post-transition city’s inhabitants. Berlin-based curator and former long-time editor-in-chief of the influential journal Camera Austria, Maren Lübbke-Tidow, contributes an essay on Es gibt keinen Stroop-Bericht mehr (The Stroop Report No Longer Exists) by French artist Tatiana Lecomte, based in Vienna. Lübbke-Tidow describes Lecomte’s work as “deeply infused with skepticism toward the omnipresent medium of photography,” noting that the artist repeatedly focuses on its “inherent shortcomings—what it shows or can show, and what it simultaneously conceals.”

Also in this issue, artist Ana Mušćet talks about the making of her graphic novel on painter Nasta Rojc, published earlier this year by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. Nasta Rojc: I, the Fighter is based on autobiographical writings and letters by Rojc, with a script by Leonida Kovač. Through a series of extensive collages, Mušćet sought to “create atmosphere alongside factual material, with subtle hints at the interconnectedness of time and space,” as she notes in her interview.

Brought together under the common theme Our Histories, the first issue thus presents three distinct artistic voices—three women artists using photography to reveal often invisible mechanisms of the politics of looking. In doing so, they question strategies of gender relations, highlight the role of photography in constructing history and mediating images of the world, and treat the medium as a platform for critical reflections on the reality that surrounds us.

Thanks to designers Dora Bilić and Tina Müller of the bilić_müller design studio, FOTOTXT has taken on a subtle yet powerful visual identity. Inspired by the magazine’s title, the designers play with the relationship between image (photography) and word (text) by introducing round “windows” that appear throughout the pages—sometimes revealing image fragments behind the text, and sometimes the reverse. The cover follows the same logic, evoking the camera lens: a tool that isolates the scene from its surroundings, while at the same time (and precisely for that reason) possessing the power to reshape our perception and understanding of relationships.

The first issue of FOTOTXT was published in early July 2019 as a bilingual edition (Croatian-English) by the Office for Photography, with the support of the Goethe-Institut Kroatien and the Ministry of Culture. The magazine is available at the Office for Photography (Čanićeva 6, Zagreb) for 20 HRK. If you can’t make it to the office, feel free to contact us at info@officeforphotography.com.