Stanko Abadžić: Inspiration From Masters Of Photography

Stanko Abadžić (born 1952 in Vukovar) is a Croatian photographer and photojournalist. He lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.

Stanko Abadžić began his professional career in photography as a photojournalist for the Croatian daily newspaper Vjesnik. During that period he made well-known reportages from Tunisia, Malta, Turkey and other countries.

After the onset of the Croatian war of independence in 1991, Abadžić moved abroad and would not return to Croatia for many years. After four years in Germany, he spent seven years in the Czech Republic in Prague, a city which had the greatest impact on his artistic expression. At this point in his career he moved away from photojournalism towards art photography.

In the Czech Republic he participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions, the largest of which was a retrospective exhibition at the gallery Dom Jozefa Sudka in Prague, on which occasion his first monograph U ogledalu života (In The Mirror of Life) was published. In 2002 he returned to Croatia and the Croatian photography scene with a large exhibition at the Mimara Museum, where he exhibited In Absentia, his most famous series from Prague.

As an art photographer Abadžić’s works almost exclusively in black-and-white film, evoking a sense of nostalgia and times gone by in his works. The artist also cites the influence of old masters of photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson.