The Dominant Role of Photography
Abstract
Pavol Breier is a Slovak documentary photographer. Subjects typical of his work are mountain and alpine nature and the lives of the people in its embrace. Photographs published in the portfolio includes three series. The common characteristic feature of them is time-lapse. Tales from Zázrivá tells the story of shepherds and herdsmen from Zázrivá. The series lends a new look to a story which is at once both old and new – the cabinet arrangements of mementos of the past bring us closer to the “salašník” or mountain shepherd of the 1970s, and his traditional pastoral life in an untouched landscape encircled dramatically by mountains, in dialogue with full colour, large-format evocative portraits from the present day. Hrob [Grave] is a documentary about an Orthodox religious pilgrimage in eastern Slovakia. In the 1970s, believers made this pilgrimage once a year to the hill of Horb to visit a hermit monk during the celebrations of the Feast of the Transfiguration. The author returned here after 50 years to capture the changes in this genius loci and the character of the pilgrimage itself. The monuments, covered before their unveiling, inspired Breier to create a series of photographs and photomontages in which the figures of socialist realism were transformed into phantoms of socialist surrealism. After November 1989, Breier saw that some monuments were covered up, to never be unveiled again. They were covered before their removal. By photographing them in this form, he documented the individual phases of life of these monuments, a time arc that has finally come to a close.
Key Words
Documentary Photography. Monuments. Pilgrimage. Shepherds. Zázrivá.
Breier, P. (2026). The Dominant Role of Photography. European Journal of Media, Art & Photography, 14(1), 42-71. https://doi.org/10.34135/ejmap-26-01-02
The Dominant Role of Photography © 2026 by Pavol Breier is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
