The Online Photographer and Peter Turnley published this week a two-part story on the life and career of master printer to the stars Voja Mitrovic. A Yugoslav immigrant to France, Mitrovic began working at the famous Picto lab in Paris and became essentially the personal printer to such greats as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka. The piece in part one and part two provides a terrific backstory to Mitrovic’s own life and his role in printing some of the most famous photographs of the last century.

He indicated to me that the three most important things involved in being a great printer are patience, developing a good dialogue and communication with the photographer he is printing for, and knowing how to read a negative. It is most important to know the photographer, to know what he or she wants, and to be able to read the image—like photographers, some people see things, and others don’t! Great printing involves knowing how to choose the right paper, having technical skills, and a strong artistic and aesthetic sense. He feels that it has helped him very much to have been himself a photographer, in order to understand the goal of a photograph.

Theatre of War from Richard Mosse on Vimeo.

We’ve posted a few times about Richard Mosse’s work, most recently about his Pink Soldiers and earlier about a related project to this video, “Breach”. It is great to see how is vision and passion for “classical history paintings” translates into a solemn and measured video piece.

Found via A Photo Student’s tremendous post full of wonderful photographer-related videos. It’ll take me to get through all of that good stuff, and I’ll probably be finding other gems to post here too. (just check out the Winogrand interview!)

Childhood
by Zeljko Naic

These images were made during two years of therapy that I have prescribed myself, in order to release the tensions and deal with complexes haunting me since I was a child. My first memories are of colorful balloons that I was playing with and a black dog’s nose sniffing my face. I also remember a man in soldier’s uniform leaning over my cradle.

My father left us when I was eight years old. My mother, trying to bring food to the table, worked low-payed jobs long after her retirement. But she could not replace him in every respect. Many things I have learned the hard way, or have never learned. When I was sixteen, the war came. Society collapsed.

Once again I felt abandoned, this time by my fatherland. People suddenly became strangers, caring only about the barest survival. The first casualty was morality, and future became irrelevant. Not that I blame them, really. They didn’t know better.

Without proper guidance, without a role model youths can only do so much with their lives. And the accumulated incapacity of individuals to make significant progress can only form a retarded society. I need to further explore these problems on both my personal and societal levels, in order to find catharsis and be able to better bring up my own children.

Today we introduce a new feature, the Dvafoto Galleries. In addition to linking to photos we find around the world that we have decided to publish some of this work directly on Dvafoto, soon in a special section of the site. The first in this series is my good friend Zeljko Naic. His work stands out in the exciting Belgrade photo community because of how extremely personal and long-term his commitment is to the work. We hope you enjoy it and leave any reactions or comments below

Pause in our normal programming for a bit of an update on what I have been up to here in the Balkans. Lots has been going on and it seems like it will be continuing through the summer. And Scott and I have plenty of interesting things planned for dvafoto so keep tuned.

My long-term project about the relocation of Belgrade Roma “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” is currently featured in Lens Culture magazine. This project was also shortlisted by Anthropographia and was included in the exhibition at the New York Photography Festival and will continue to tour worldwide (a cool picture of the exhibition, snapped by a NY friend, is in the gallery above).

I’ve also published “Chapter Two” of this project on my Photoshelter Archive and included some images in the gallery above, so you can catch up on the project since my last post about the project on dva. I am continuing to photograph this story, following the families of the Gazela camp as they resettle around Serbia following the destruction of their community.

Lastly, thanks to friend Pete Brook at Prison Photography for writing about my work on this project in a post titled The Roma People: Matt Lutton building upon a legacy of wandering photographers.

I also have published on my archive a new gallery of work from Bosnia in an ongoing project called “This Time Tomorrow”. I will be following events in Bosnia closely as political and economic stagnation continues to slowly suffocate the country. Some tectonic shift will and must come to solve one of the world’s most entrenched political crises. Maybe tomorrow, but probably not.

I am currently focused on completing my book about Serbia in the aftermath of the Milosevic decade, titled “Only Unity”. My project was recently announced as one of seven nominees for the POYi Emerging Vision Incentive, a $10,000 grant for an emerging photographer. See some of the work and my (full) proposal at the POYi website. Congrats to the winner of the grant, James Chance and the other nominees.

I am also announcing for the first time publicly the existence of an tumblr sketchbook for this project: onlyunity.tumblr.com. Have a look if you want to follow me feel my way through this work. The latest news is that I’ve finished the first book dummy, which will serve as my university thesis, enabling me to finally graduate this year.

It has been a busy couple of months with a few interesting assignments, taking me from Budapest on a corporate job to a British international school in Belgrade for a UK newspaper. There is much to come this summer, including a trip to a Serbian winery connected to the royal family and projects to be featured in well known online publications. And of course focus on Dvafoto. I look forward to sharing this all soon, and I hope you are enjoying your summer (or winter, if you happen to be south of the equator).

One of my favorite local blogs Belgraded.com posted this video and story earlier this week. On May 15, 2010, the night of the Museums in Belgrade, Italian photographer Luca Donnini wheat-pasted an exhibition of his work on an alley near one of the main squares. He posted them at around 0230am on Saturday morning and by 0900am that same morning the whole “show” had been torn down by police and city cleaning crews. Quite a bummer, as this looks like it would have been a beautiful installation. See the video for the whole scenario. (Possibly NSFW due to some nudity in the photographs)

But this is even more interesting on a local Belgrade level because it could be considered what Belgraded calls “Police Vandalism” of the artwork. For me, its offensive that the city will respond within hours to clean up a “legitimate” piece of street art when they’ll turn their backs for weeks or months when horrible, dangerous homophobic graffiti (example and story here) are thrown all around town. Very wrong priorities here.

But on a happer note, I am so pleased to see that someone is doing guerilla photo exhibitions like this, especially in my own Balkan city. Taking it to the streets, doing it yourself, damn inspiring. See my post which kicked off my obsession with this idea: Taking photos back to the street and a recent post about Simon Norfolk’s outdoor exhibition at Guernsey Photography Festival. Or to JR’s massive “Women are Heroes” exhibition in Paris which takes this to the extreme (direct link to the video) .

I’m excited to announce I’ll be presenting my series, China Everbright, at Shanghai’s Dada club on Wednesday, March 24, 2010, at around 8pm. The event was organized by the multi-talented Tim Franco, who’s been spearheading the monthly event and drawing quite a crowd. I was in Xian over the weekend and met some people from Shanghai who knew about the event and were planning on being there. If it lives up to previous photographers nights at the club, it’ll definitely be the place to be on Wednesday. Check out the facebook event page. I know Matthew Niederhauser will be there showing some work, and there will be a few Chinese photographers as well. If you’re there, please say hello.

(and a big thanks to Patrick Wack for getting me connected with the event)

Four of my images (above) from the series Young and Abandoned, portraits of orphans on the verge of institutionalization in rural Jiangsu Province, China, will be included in an exhibition at Fe艺术iv’Art (Feztiv Art) in Shanghai, China, from January 22-26th, 2010. There is an opening on January 22 at 6:30 pm. I’ll be there.

The festival was created by the Artdidact, the Artistic Commission of the French Junior Chamber International of Shanghai, whose aim is “to take part and contribute to the progress of the global community by giving to the young the opportunity to develop their leadership skills, their social responsibility and the necessary solidarity for taking actions to produce positive changes. Members of the JCI identify and realize projects to serve the positive evolution of their city in all fields: arts, social, economics, cultural, community…”

The subject of the exhibition is “China Youth,” and the pictures will be on display at Art + Shanghai Gallery at Fumin Lu, Lane 22, House 2, (Near Yanan Lu). Phone: +86-21 6248 4388. In the off-chance that someone in Shanghai is reading this, I hope to see you there.

David Walter Banks (previously interviewed) wrote in to tell us about the upcoming Luceo Images and MJR publication and one-night exhibition at 25CPW in New York City. The event will take place Thursday, Janaury 21, 2010, from 6-10pm at 25 Central Park West at the intersection of 62nd Street. The folks at Luceo and MJR are good friends of dva. The groups both have a ton of photo mojo, and it’s great to see their efforts combined. I asked Banks a few questions about the publication and event. His answers are excerpted below:

dvafoto: What got Luceo and MJR together? How long have you been working on this project?

David Walter Banks/Luceo: Various members of LUCEO and MJR have become friends over the past couple years, and had some time to spend together at LUCEO’s last two biannual meetings in NYC and then again at the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville. The show and publication have been at least 6 months in the making that I can remember….

Why a publication?

Both groups have strong editorial ties as well as work that leans more toward the fine-art world, so the publication was a mix between the two. The idea was to create something tangible and lasting instead of just a one-night event. It’s also the concept of taking the idea of a magazine, and creating a limited edition collectible art piece out of it. A publication that in our eyes warrants large-scale reproduction and display space on a gallery wall. To this end, the focus is more on the print piece instead of the show itself, but the catch is that you have to attend to receive the publication.

Will we be seeing new work? Whose work will be in the show (all the photographers in each collective or just a selection?)?

The piece and show will feature work from each photographer involved in the two groups, as well as the craftsmanship of the designer and editor we had the good fortune of collaborating with. The show will feature some old work and some new, but certainly all in a different presentation than before.

The release says “Issue One” — will Issue Two also be Luceo and MJR, or is the first issue testing the waters for something bigger? When will we see #2?

We’re not ready to announce anything yet, but the door is open, and this will certainly not be the end of our collaborations with MJR, who have been the driving force behind the publication….

I wouldn’t say the show is just testing the waters, because I do believe it is an end and not just a means, but it is a sign of what’s to come. Both of these groups have similar feelings about collaborating and building bridges within the photographic community and beyond. I believe each group will build from this experience and take that forward into future endeavors.

Luceo is: David Walter Banks, Kendrick Brinson, Matt Eich, Kevin German, Tim Lytvinenko, Daryl Peveto, Matt Slaby
MJR is: Mustafah Abdulaziz, Ying Ang, Matthew Craig, Julius Metoyer, Gareth Phillips, Brandon Thibodeaux

Studio 360 interviewed Dva favorite and friend Jason Eskenazi about his life as a Metropolitan Museum of Art security guard and his relationship to the art all around him. It culminates in his experiences with the brilliant exhibition Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (which is on view through January 3rd, and which I get to see in a couple days!).

You’ve got to listen, only 5 and a half minutes. Beautiful.
And he alludes to new work coming, cannot wait.

(h/t Tom Leininger)

Incredibly last minute announcement but I will be in New York City next week, December 21st through 23rd, for a quick visit with publications, editors and friends and to continue my project I See A Darkness. I will have new work and portfolios to share, including an under-wraps book project that will begin immediately upon my return to Serbia in January. (Did I even mention that I’m back in Seattle for the holidays? It’s been busy.)

If you are in the City and feel like meeting up to see work, see an exhibition (I’ve got Ballen, Frank, and Mosse on my schedule right now) or grab a beer, be in touch! It’ll be a crazy quick visit but it might be my only one this year.