<<    PUTTING IT TOGETHER Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the kings horses and all the kings men Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again. Taking photographs is easy -you point the camera and press the shutter. Light and chemistry do the rest. Perhaps it is this very ease which makes them so difficult to understand. For every photograph there is a photographer, always hidden yet always there. For every city there are many inhabitants, sometimes ghostly, always there. Where does the photograph intersect with the city? Is the city the thing that is photographed? Is the photographer an inhabitant? What is a photograph? What is a city? There is a city that has a river running trough it. There are bridges across this river, people and cars. There are buildings, monuments, grass and trees. People use things and throw them away, lights come and go off. There is daytime and there is nighttime. There are interiors and windows that look out. It is a city where we might have been or where we might be now or could be tomorrow. The photographer is in this city taking photographs. No two are the same, though the differences may be slight. The city lives in time, the photograph fractures time. There is nothing outside the photograph, everything is there. It is coherent, whatever is outside the photograph is not there - except the photographer. Two photographs together are two photographs, they never become one. But there may be something between the photographs, a time or a space. What is between the photographs is something in the present whilst photographs are always in the past. Perhaps this thing that is there is the city we have been thinking of. Miroslav Perkovic and Milica Lukic are two artists who make very insistent work. There is a precision to the assembly of their pieces which talks of deliberation and decision. Facts seem important - this space, that depth, this material, that profile. Photographs are also facts and sometimes used as evidence. Precision and care in presentation lead me to look hard at the photographs in the work of Miroslav and Milica. What I find revealed are two subjects, both present and absent at the same time. On the one hand there is the photographer, anonymous, hidden but always there, where you or I stand looking. The other subject, both in and between the photographs, is a city. The city is fractured and partial, inhabited and empty. Somewhere in the middle of these two subjects lie time and the imagination. This is interesting. Richard Deacon. 9 October 2ooo                                   Essay from Catalogue "Paris-London 2000", Published by Museum of Contemporary Art  Belgrade, 2000 Slides from "Paris-London 2000", Photo Installation, Show of Milica Lukic & Miroslav Perkovic, Salon of Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, 2000 Cityproject, Paris-London New York City,1999-09