This magnificent Photo Album „Time Hunter. Ordinary Latvian Fisherman, Romantic Soul and Patriot – The Photographer Uldis Briedis” compiled by Art Historian Laima Slava contains 650 photographs taken by the master of photography and press photographer Uldis Briedis. It also includes texts by Laima Slava ‘In conversation with Uldis Briedis’, Alise Tīfentāle ‘Uldis Briedis and some aspects of documentary photography’, Olafs Gūtmanis ‘Faithful to the sea’, Armīns Lejiņš ‘The photography of U.B. as a fragment of the yearning for freedom, the illusions and the comedy of an age’ and Egīls Zirnis ‘Stories with pictures and without’.
„Photographer and pressman Uldis Briedis empathises affectionately and jealously with his country, his time and the people of his time.
In his „fragments of reality”, Briedis does not look for an abstract essence of the concrete, decisive moment – he finds the facts that are the most typical, and reveals the signifiers and meanings of his time.
These become testimonies of the era and hence expressive evidence of a matter in which we, the photographer’s contemporaries, are and once will have been participants,” says Andrejs Grants.
In the hunting grounds of the press, I’ve been peering through my little rectangular window and pointing my camera lens for forty-four years now. Thirty of these have been in black and white. The images in this book start from 1966 and end with 1996 (with a few exceptions), when film technology passed into history and the digital age commenced. For me, this was a very interesting period, because it was not just technology that changed: so did the political system. Most significantly, Latvia’s independence was restored. Whether it’s due to a lack of idealism or the sudden effect of the power of money, life in a free, independent state has still not met expectations. But that would be a story for the next book.