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In the Nineties, it seemed that we heard nothing about Slovak impromptu and documentary photography for a long time (outside the master of Slovak documentary Karol Kallay, only the work of Andrej Bán seemed to have distinct features) but the beginning of a new century, surprisingly, brought several striking personalities of the young generation to public notice. This happened mostly due to efforts of the organizations Slovenský dokument (Slovak Documentary) and the Institut pro veřejné otázky (Institute for Public Questions) in Bratislava - apart from preparing annual sociological reports, these initiated a one-year grant program for the photographic documentation of contemporary Slovakia. Already the first year (2001) brought significant success. It introduced Martin Kollár and his movement away from traditional topics. He stressed the importance of color photography and sarcastic humor, hardly acceptable for traditional humanistic photography. Thus, he became a forerunner of and at the same time inspiration to several other photographers: Lucia Nimcová, Andrej Balco and Josef Ondzik. Unil then, color pictures with a humorous and/or ironic undertone were done only by Mišo Suchý, a Slovak living in the United States.Lucia Nimcová is not the only remarkable Slovak artist who leans toward documentary photography. At the same time she has managed through her work to establish herself in the sphere of Slovak photography. Her first documentary pictures from the mid-Nineties, when she was a young student at the Institut tvůrčí fotografie Filozoficko- přírodovědecké fakulty Slezské Univerzity v Opavě (Institute of Creative Photography in Opava), already attracted intense attention. At the time, she was taking pictures of her close environment with unusual interest and sincerity. Her work was on the border of subjective documentary and creative photography - be it in case of her pictures of the Miková village, where the parents of Andy Warhol were born, or her series O sobě (About Myself) (1997- 1999) and Amerika (America) (1999). Her affinity toward a poetics, sense of metaphor and slightly magical vision of reality, close to the films of Slovak directors Juraj Jakubisko and Martin Šulík, was still tangible in her work then. She would enter freely a captured ”personal“ reality - by drawing in her photographs, coloring, blue toning, shifting the color spectrum of the film... sometimes she would accompany her pictures with excerpts from various texts or poems. Later on, she would step over the boundaries of the purely documentary and would start taking pictures from television screens and attempt more conceptual series. But in fact, she never attempted either social, subjective or narrative documentary, as was often said about her work - though at times, she would freely work with topics and visual language borrowed from those trends. A more complex attitude was needed if one wanted to approach the pictures of Lucia Nimcová.
She has concentrated on the gender aspect of ”Femaleness“, which has become a constant topic of her creative interest. Sometimes, she would reflect her own feelings and experience and turn her camera on herself, sometimes she would follow nuns in an orthodox monastery or attempt to portray a woman in today's complex social environment. In 2001-2003, Nimcová created the conceptual series Women, consisting of intimate shots of her female friends in their private space. There they live, as the author puts it, ”with their current problems, which must be solved, and they are naked to a degree they are willing to show.“ The sequences of four gradually unveiling pictures of each - for the author - ”exceptional“ woman do not disclose anything about their pro- blems. In a gentle hint, they enable us to peep into their psychic world and mostly, into the relationship between the woman and her partner. Love, misunderstanding, passivity, domestic violence, everything is mixed here together in the moment of intimate meeting between the photographer and the photographed woman. The portrait and the nude, everything is merely hinted at, without stories and clear judgment.
It seems that for Nimcová, her collection Women - Slovakia 2003, the project she worked on in 2003 as the winner of the above-mentioned grant from the Slovak Institute for Public Questions, has been, so far, crucial. In the strictly limited time between the beginning of the grant and the presentation of its results at the Month of Photography in Bratislava, she travelled all over Slovakia to concentrate, in the end, on the contemporary female. This female is looking for her way in the wide spectrum of worlds offered to her. There are stereotypes of accepted conventions and popular beliefs as to how she should live, surrounded by instant ready-mades, images of what life style she should share and her own dreams of her fate. Mostly, she is a woman caught somewhere between an ironing board, gas stove, cradle, laptop, exercises, English courses, a professional career and shopping. And more, she is a woman molded by magazines for women, popular television series, stereotypes, social conventions and the economic reality of contemporary Slovakia. Lucia Nimcová presents a mosaic of the possible fates of a Slovak woman, a woman belonging to Central Europe - but mostly, she is a city woman rather than one living in the countryside - with radically different social roles, relationships and work.
In the past two years since this series, Lucia Nimcová shifted her attention from Slovak women to women of the larger Central European region. It is mostly women who are depicted in her photographs from Viennese ballroom dances - Gruss Gott! (2004), the pictures from her collection Pride (2004) and also in most of the pictures from her latest series, Ossies (2004).
A descriptive female attention paid to detail - make up, clothing, jewelery - represents a typical feature of her pictures. One can sense the air of shared intimacy, resulting from her choice of environment and her relationship to the photographed women. Intimacy is manifested here as a traditionally ascribed female attribute within the conventionally rigid polarity: male - expansion and external world; female - family and private world. Pictures can become so persuasive, because together with all these unfocused Central European females on a quest among alternatives too difficult to connect, the photographer herself walks as one of them. These photographs mostly represent the intimate and emotional search of the author herself - her quest for the female role in this world. In the time period into which she herself was born as a woman.