Sandra Vitaljić is an artist of the younger generation,
interested in history and theory of photography. Her
interests range from commercial, documentary, and
experimental to socially engaged photography. Her
circle entitled ‘’Neplodna tla“ (‘’Infertile Grounds“)
on which she started working about ten years ago,
reflects the artist‘s desire to encapture the landscape
filled with sorrows and pain of the human past.
Like a historian, she visits the battlefields, sites of
mass murders and torture, the remains of the infamous
concentration camps of the World War II, as
well as the sites of the recent Croatian Homeland
war, bringing the horrible images back to life with
each photograph.
What at first glance seems to be a poetic wooded
landscape, a desolated riverbank in the mist, or a
view on the abandoned fishtank, hides a deeper
meaning and captures different stories that are left
for each generation of spectators to decipher themselves,
based on their personal experiences or their
nationality. The artist‘s use of old, analogue camera
reveals her nostalgic feelings for a time before the
digital photography. The artist is led by her intuition in
her choice of localities and scenes. Emotional charge
that one feels upon looking at her photographs is
a result of artist‘s use of close captioning of chosen
details. She documents the images objectively and
without comment. Her goal is simply to save the
places from being forgotten.
Ivana Janković