Jutta Benzenberg in “Ahead with the past”

TIRANA, April 27 – After the successful stage at the Zeta gallery in Tirana, German photographer Jutta Benzenberg is recently having her “Ahead with the past” exhibition on display at the Arts Gallery in the southwestern city of Fier. The exhibition shows Albania’s journey of transition during the past 20 years after the collapse of the 45-year communist regime in the early 90s.
“Jutta has caught people in the struggles of their everyday lives… But this is not all. The characters in these photographs may be bound to the past, but they have their own deep inner world which the photographs bring to the surface. They do not hide their secrets, and indeed they seem to ask the photographer her own,” curators say.
In 1991, she traveled for the first time through Albania to shoot photographs of those upset times, to capture Albanian portraits and landscapes and to produce a book, which was published after several Albania-journeys in spring 1993 in Salzburg, Austria, under the title: “Albanisches ݢerleben” – Albanian Survival.
Since that time, Jutta had a lot of exhibitions on Albanian themes in different cities of Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and Albania.
Jutta has caught people in the struggles of their everyday lives, in scenes which bear the marks either of the socialist past or of Albania’s age-old poverty. Some illustrate unsuccessful endeavours to overcome both, in the shape of a newly-acquired kitsch prosperity, with shimmering satin and floating tulle curtains. Sometimes the subjects of these photographs, still in thrall to the past, are not people, but buildings, rooms, railway stations, mining towns, dogs and horses, forests and lakes. Unlike tourist photographers who attempt to exclude every blemish and stain, and all the rubble and debris of the past, Jutta consistently includes these things in her vision, or rather finds them wherever she goes.
But Jutta’s work extends across an entire twenty-year period. In October 1991, she took black-and-white photographs in the internees’ villages of Lushnj묠in the former prison of Spa笠and on the roads as the migrants poured toward the Greek border at Kakavija and Kapshtica. In 2010 she compiled the “Ahead with the past” book, which contains mostly photographs from the last two or three years, but which are nevertheless connected to her earlier work.