A Husband in Paris

by Jim Casper, editor-in-chief of online photography magazine LensCulture

Published in the catalogue of Katarina Radović's exhibition A Husband in Paris in Dom Omladine Gallery in Belgrade, December 2008

Despite the surface appearance of casual snapshots, this series of photographs carries powerful, unnerving, and multi-faceted subtexts. We may be amused by the audacity and playfulness of the preposterous idea that initiates each encounter. But at the same time, our amusement can quickly shift into uneasiness about the desperate measures that this situation could depict if it were real.

When we engage with each image, and extrapolate into the future of each potential couple, we are forced to contemplate the very real repercussions of how one’s personality and identity can be defined, altered, expanded or contracted by the personality of one’s mate (and all of his or her extenuating circumstances), as well as, in this case, perhaps chasm-like cultural differences.

Despite the pretext (an attractive and slightly crazy woman ‘in the hurry’ to marry someone as a ticket out of her current situation, we realize who has the power in these photographs, and perhaps who would hold the power in such a marriage. Clearly the photographer is director, actor and provocateur. Even while casting herself in the role of a woman in need, she is controlling the men who accept her proposition to pose with her in each photograph. Perhaps they are bemused, bewitched, hopeful – or merely happy to pause in their own ordinary day to surrender to a spontaneous crazy flight of fantasy. But she has cast her spell, and the results (these photographs), are brilliant.

Every pose has its own charge. That’s the beauty here – there is no formula. The possibility of each pairing takes its own trajectory, launching us into speculation about how one personality can transform the path of the other. What will this marriage create? And what will it cancel out? This triggers an endless series of questions that ask ‘What if…?’.