Croatia’s “Modest Beauty”

By Marcus Tanner

A new exhibition of photographs in London captures the rugged and unforgiving quality of the landscape of southern Dalmatia.

Green wooden shutters on a background of stone bake in harsh sunlight. A gothic church tower stands silhouetted against a glowing, red-ochre sunset. The turquoise waters of a shallow bay meet the aquamarine blue of the horizon.

The landscape could only be Dalmatia, whose harsh and jagged contours form the theme of young Croatian photographer Robert Krivec’s new exhibition, “Modest Beauty”, which opened in London this week.

Krivec, who has been living in London since 2007, says the title of the exhibition – set up with the aid of the Croatian embassy’s Flora Turner – was intended to convey something of the simplicity of the panorama in south-central Dalmatia and the islands, a quality he has been exploring and trying to capture on lens for the last seven years.

“This is a landscape that doesn’t change much,” he says. “There is little new technology. People are still living more or less as they did about 60 years ago.”

People play very little direct part in these pictures, which more often explore the relationship between the natural elements – the sea, sky, fields of long grasses, bent trees, and rocks – and various items that local people have constructed from those same elements, such as stone houses, wooden shutters, church towers and fishermen’s nets.

Humans themselves are rarely present, adding an air of stillness and timelessness to the compositions. But the humble nature of their artefacts, the low stone cottages, the cracked shatters, serves as a reminder that Dalmatia’s transformation into the holiday playground of the rich is a new phenomenon. Traditionally, this was an unyielding sort of a place, ancient in terms of human settlement but where life was a struggle.

The photographer’s evident fascination with the harsh edges of the landscape possibly reflects the fact that he is not a native and so sees it with the observant eye of an outsider. Krivec comes from the very different world of Zagreb, where the relationship of light to landscape is quite different and where, of course, there is no sea. In these photographs, on the other hand, the sea is a constant presence, its proximity felt even when it is not seen.

‘Modest Beauty’ runs until February 28 at the Gallery of the Croatian Embassy, 21 Conway St, London W1. For more information on the exhibition and sale prices, contact Flora Turner on [email protected] and Robert Krivec, at [email protected]

Source: Balkan Insight

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Posted by editor on Jan 18 2009. Filed under Travel & Leisure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry