Basedot Creative Sessions #1

Basedot Creative Sessions is a new series of talks and informal studio gatherings that bring together visual creatives working across photography and film, as well as broader voices from across the visual culture.

Each session explores the process behind creative work rather than just the final image, looking closely at ideas and the decisions that shape contemporary commercial, documentary and editorial production.

Intended as an open, practical space for industry exchange, the sessions are aimed at creatives who want to get inspired, expand their network, and stay connected to the visual storytelling community.

Matjaž Tančič: Photographs from the Past and the Future: Portraits from North Korea and the Path to Mars

Both long-form projects in this talk are about subjects hidden in plain sight. We have all seen North Korea: the parades, the satellite images of darkness, the "rare glimpse" through a bus window. We have all seen space, the rockets, the billionaires, the Mars rovers in our newsfeeds. And yet, in both cases, what we have actually seen is a surface. The people inside it, we have not met.

Matjaž Tančič's North Korea project is a series of more than a hundred 3D portraits made on the rare occasions Western photographers are allowed into the country. Rather than the usual telephoto "rare glimpse" of a stranger across a square, Tančič used a slow, deliberate technique that required introduction, demonstration, and conversation. Boxers, brewers, factory workers, doctors, a wedding party, looking back at the camera, on their own terms.

His ongoing project Mars on Earth is the same impulse applied to a subject the West thinks it already knows. For eight years, he has been photographing the global community, preparing humanity for life beyond Earth; not Musk and Bezos, but the women space architects in India, the Mongolian engineers building camel-inspired rovers, the Pakistani educator teaching astronomy to twenty thousand children, the biologists growing food without soil, the doctors training to operate on Mars.

One project looks like 1970. The other looks like 2070. Both are about going beyond the image we already have and meeting the people inside it.

Matjaž Tančič (b. 1982) is a Slovenian lens-based artist working between Ljubljana and Shanghai. His practice moves across documentary, portrait, and art photography, with a particular reputation for 3D stereography. He studied photography at the University of the Arts London and has exhibited in more than 100 shows worldwide, published four monographs, and worked for National Geographic, TIME, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Wired and others. He is a first-prize winner at the Sony World Photography Awards and a member of the Inland photo cooperative. Insta @matjaztancic

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