University of Delaware
Office of Public Relations
UpDate - Vol. 16, No. 20, Feb. 20, 1997

           Photo exhibit on Eastern Europe comes to gallery
                                   
  Broken Views: A Document of Eastern Europe," the theme of
an exhibition by photographer Todd Matus, will be in the
University Gallery in Old College from March 7 through April
14.
  A reception and artist's talk is scheduled from 4:30-6:30
p.m., Friday, March 14. The exhibition, talk and reception
are all free and open to the public.
  A native of Indianapolis, Matus has traveled extensively
since 1989 throughout Eastern Europe, documenting the people
and places he has encountered. The 42 large-format, gelatin
silver prints included in his exhibition are part of a
series taken in Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, Romania and
especially Bulgaria.
  It is Bulgaria with which Matus is most familiar, the
result of his involvement with Consort International, a
violin production company in which he is a partner. His
Indiana company maintains a joint relationship with a
Bulgarian factory in the manufacture of violins overseas.
  For the last eight years, Matus, who directs quality
control for the company, spends weeks at a time at the
Bulgarian site.
  The exhibition of photos is accompanied by written texts
that chronicle Matus' experiences as a visiting American,
giving insight into the turbulence and struggle that has
confronted the region and challenged the people since the
fall of the Berlin Wall.
  In his memoirs, The Truth that Killed, writer Georgi
Markov describes life under the Communist Party in Bulgaria
as if caught in "an incredible labyrinth."
  "If you are a hero today, you may be a traitor tomorrow,
hanged the day after tomorrow and rehabilitated with a
monument erected to you the day after that," he writes.
  Markov fled the brutality and indignity of this
totalitarian system in 1969, only to die in 1978 after a
suspicious encounter with a mysterious stranger, who stabbed
him in the thigh with a poisoned umbrella point. Markov died
four days later.
  His assassination was carried out to silence his speaking
and writing about the decaying social, political and moral
conditions in his native country. Had he lived until
November 1989, he would have experienced the dramatic events
that resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the
disintegration of the Eastern bloc.
  Matus first ventured behind the Iron Curtain in October
1989- at the beginning of this historic period of
transition. Along with his camera, he carried in his
suitcase Markov's book, still considered contraband within
Bulgaria's borders at the time.
  Matus has said he was both entranced and bewildered by
what he saw and experienced, and he was overwhelmed with an
almost desperate desire to record this dissonance in words
and pictures.
  "Broken Views: A Document of Eastern Europe" is the
result of an eight-year effort to capture images that
reconcile Matus' American sensibilities with the region's
enigmatic landscape and the peoples who populate it.
  Matus is one of a number of younger photographers who
trace their lineage to a generation of New Topographic
photographers like Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal and Robert
Adams-individuals who have, over the last two decades,
defined a type of visual anthropology in their work.
  Like those of the New Topographers, Matus' images are
straightforward and almost clinical in approach.
Unsentimental and, in some cases, bland and unblinking, the
pictures are precise and spare representations of a foreign
environment and an attempt to navigate it.
  Matus also has found a subject to which he has
passionately bonded, and part of that emotion is transmitted
in the beauty and empathy equally expressed in the
photographs.
  The images provoke a compelling feeling of the Balkans'
long and turbulent history, and the consequences of the
deliberate and officially sanctioned disregard of that
history under Communist rule.
  Taken in the countryside and city squares throughout
Eastern Europe, the photographs offer an intriguing
narrative of courage in spite of decades of oppression and
determined optimism in the face of an uncertain future.
  University Gallery hours are 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesdays
through Fridays, and 1-5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays. The
gallery is closed on Mondays.
  For more information, call 831-8242, fax 831-4330 or TDD
831-4552. The University Gallery also can be visited on-line
at http://seurat.art.udel.edu