Catalogue "Roads to Timbuktu"

Preface by Michael Reinsch

How to approach a myth or cliché, how disappointment or hope?
It is not a question of means of transport or the four points of the compass, even if it concerns a town in the Republic of Mali with defined coordinates. Of course, Timbuktu is more than a name.
"The inhabitants of Timbuktu are merry people and they move around town with music and dance from the 22nd hour of the day till the first hour of the night", Johann Leo Afrikanus wrote in his "Description of Africa" in 1550 – from his own experience.
Today only a few thousand people are living there. Fertility converted into drought, wealth and power into poverty and distress.
The sound of the word Timbuktu congures up images of caravans, salt and slave trade, of treasures of gold in the palace of the mighty king and the wisdom of scholars at the universities in town.
What a contrast to the Africa, the Sahara, that we see in reality. Do we see Africa at all?
The journey to Timbuktu is arduous.
Mirko Krizanovic made it – coming from Burkina Faso by the way, but that is irrelevant. He has travelled the continent from North to South, from West to East.
Reporters like him get us closer to foreign countries and to unknown people. We see them in his pictures, through his eyes.
Mirko Krizanovic was a photographer with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He gave up his employment in favour of the risky freedom, to work not only for the day, for the deadline within a few hours, but with more time.
He has changed during these five years. The photographs show how his style has developed. It may sound paradoxical, but this is because of the art of allowing the "things" of his pictures to be the subject instead of the object in the photograph. It is not the photographer who determines the photograph but the situation. Therefore, the pictures of Mirko Krizanovic have become rougher and tougher with increasing sensitiveness towards the object. The brillance of the technical perfection diminishes if it is the only way to capture the soul of the moment. No flash brightens the mysterious interior of the simple room in the desert of Mauretania blinding the people gathered together inside. No Kodacolor tries in vain to conserve
the variety and nuances of the colours of continuously changing shades.
Whether in a peaceful atmosphere or a scene of gruesome horror, whether waryly or confidentially – Mirko Krizanovic approches people with an attentive eye. Attention is another word for respect. Just as an attentive look doesen’t only need the eye but all of the senses, Mirko Krizanovic opens the aperture and shutter wide, and quick movements blur, contrasts fade into the grain of the pushed black and white film.
The photographer chooses time and place, perspective and detail – he does not determine the scene though. For a split second, the moment of the release, he lets the shaping of the photograph out of his sight. He helps the situation to depict itself.
"If a new world were discovered today, would we be able to see it? Would we be able to banish all the pictures from our mind, which we usually connect with our expectations of another world, in order to realize the actual differences spread out before our eyes?"
Italo Calvino described in 1976 how the explorers of America – discovered in the same century when the Moroccan Leo Afrikanus described his continent – obliviously passed unseen phenomena. Their eyes and their spirits were used, like our eyes and spirits today, to only realize what fits into proven classifications.
"Perhaps every day a new world emerges before us", Calvino writes, "and we don’t see it."
Roads to Timbuktu: How can you get away from something you carry in your mind?
By approaching it.

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