In Libera’s photographs, the negative view of history is turned into a positive story (hence the title of the series, which is also a reference to key photographic terms, negatives and positives). Horror is transformed into an idyll. The photos for Positives are based on staged, vivid images, in which the artist, with the help of extras, recreated as accurately as possible all the shots captured by the photographers of the dramatic events. The structure of the composition was preserved, yet the situations created by Libera present banal scenes set in our contemporary context. An exception to this is his recreation of the photo of the Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta, depicting Che Guevara immediately after his execution. In Che. Next Shot Libera meticulously reconstructed the original scene, but his photo looks as if it were taken straight after the famous shot known from the original (hence the title of this work – Next Shot). It shows how the revolutionary lights a cigar relaxing after the end of the photo session, during which he only pretended to be dead.
In his works, Libera analyses the relationship between what we see and what we remember of media coverage. He identifies the mechanisms, which allow for photographic manipulation and the fabrication of any information, having a semblance of truth.
Author: Ewa Gorządek, March 2015, transl. Bozhana Nikolova, March 2015