Butterflies is a visual story about the intriguing and difficult to determine. About moments taken out of context that usually pass unnoticed – and yet captured in photographs. It is also a story about beauty and its degradation, and the beauty of degradation.
In Butterflies Silvia Pogoda guides the readers through the stages of experiencing and perceiving the life cycle: youth, maturity and old age. For this, she uses unspecified, undefined photographs arranged in a sequence of the circle of life and death. The photographs are accompanied by short texts in which the author shares her thoughts and emotions and leads the readers. At the same time, Silvia Pogoda leaves room for interpretation and different perspectives. All photos for Butterflies, the artist’s first and long-awaited book, were taken in Japan in 2013–2019.
“It is difficult to appreciate ordinary moments that aren’t remembered as particularly important or groundbreaking – and yet they make up most of our lives. Butterflies is a tribute to such moments that pass unnoticed before our eyes. These aren’t any decisive moments, but inconspicuous fleeting glimpses that are all we have and that each form a universe. They create a flowing story about beauty and its degradation, but also about the beauty of degradation, about tension-creating energy, about energy retained in a motionless moment, about experiencing. Moments which, like pearls of a necklace, create a circle of energy, a circle of living and dying.
The idea of the book was born at the beginning of 2018 but only in the spring of 2020 when it suddenly became clear how fragile our reality can be, I thought it was the right time to create it. With this book, I was able to share my appeal, or better said my wish, that we live this life knowing that it is the only one we have.”
