LAGSTEIN GALLERY
PREDRAG DUBRAVCIC
Born in 1965 in Croatia. A few years before college, forms a distinct photography style, which helps him enroll at the Zagreb Film Academy. During studies, a small group of photographer friends coined a term for this style: "Pure Photography" – described as freedom from inheriting the meaning directly from the photographic subject, and instead creating meaning and emotion by pure photographic means: MAKING a photograph instead of CAPTURING the subject. After studies, moves to New York in 1988, and to Rockland in 1992. As a cinematographer, Predrag has lensed a number of commercials, music videos, 2 feature films and recently lead the 2nd unit on Netflix show Ripley. But the continuity of the photographic opus has never been interrupted: over the span of the last 40+ years there's just a steady evolution, sometimes shifted by the changes in technology, but mostly influenced by gradual growth of visual perception – and visual philosophy.
A sheltering title of my recent work is Everything is Inside. It is trying to suggest the power of empathy towards all that is in front of our eyes. An inside view to the outside, which of course makes them an outside view to the inside. And this inside is hopefully collective. (Please let me know.)
Basically, these images are visual explorations of some archetypal level of emotions, or emotions in our deeper selves, before they are able to be defined by words. Possibly stemming from this, there's also an ongoing (tongue in cheek) idea that what I shoot are ghosts. This kind of started as a joke, since I'd often try to capture something invisible: visual elements would be pushed to the edges of the frame, leaving some space "for our experience to unfold" in the middle. But it also reflects on the work process: there's a feeling that an image needs to happen just by being at a certain place at a certain time, before I see what I eventually photograph. And then it becomes easier, as if the communication channel opens. Whether this makes me a medium, or is all just about a visual sensitivity, can be debated.
My workflow is spontaneous and subconscious – which is why I can't attribute to it any social awareness or predetermined concept. However, since our subconscious is aware of social subjects as well, later analysis may, in retrospect, bring some of this content to light and expound on it. This art-for-arts-sake approach sounds like something romantic and anachronistic(?), and might not meet some conceptual expectations of today. But a compulsion to create, without having a choice, intent or plan, to me sounds like an advantage.
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Predrag Dubravcic