In the Negative of the First Impression

photographer Stanko Abadžić
written by Nataša Šegota Lah
 

 

Like no other photographer, Abadžić seems reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s “subjective time”, of the understanding of photography not as a copy of reality but a shaped history of the real.

 

What makes Stanko Abadžić’s photography special or different?

 

Its distinctiveness, if the answer is a single sentence, lies in the negative of the first impression. That first impression of aestheticism and documentary quality is in fact nostalgia and the de-framing of reality. For that matter, Abadžić himself has testified to that hypothesis in one of his diary notes: “I simply cannot easily accept that ambiences which were making people happy for years are disappearing.”