Branka Slijepčević on work of Petar Dabac

Lieber Pero, the diary of Petar Dabac, one of the key personalities in the contemporary Croatian photography, was made in the period from 1990 – 1995. The title repeats the beginning phrase in the letters, and the work itself that consists of about 300 photographs shows too clearly discernible layers: a lover’s diary, intertwined with a form that we could conditionally call the extended family album.

The lover’s diary is partly explicit and partly accompanied with two series of photographs: Letters and Trees. The tone of these two accompanying series is sometimes quite playful and sometimes lightly ironic. The third series, the posters and graffiti from the streets of Zagreb and other European towns, belongs to both layers and functions as a marginal messenger of the absurdity and the horror of war.

The extended family story is accompanied by three layers of motives, sometimes used as intermissions and sometimes arranged into a side groupings: Swans, Numbers, and the series On the road - the somber tone in the kaleidoscope of travels, encounters and festivities, announcing the inexorability of death and evoking regrets over missed opportunities.

If we would try to place this diary within the circle of other photographic diaries, for instance, within the context of ritual immersions into relationships of Nan Goldin, or next to the concentrated insights into the laws of memory of Seiichi Furuya, or next to the elusive version of Araki’s Dadaism - we would be faced with decisive refusal, evident in the work of Petar Dabac, to show drama as the life’s imperative, which is an implicit feature of the work of other mentioned authors. The world of Petar Dabac’s diary could be most easily defined – by its sensitivity, although not by its formal repertoire – as belonging to the surrealist tendency, but such definition would require a more detailed analysis and would not cover all dimensions of his work. In one of his statements, Petar Dabac maintains: later I understood that photography was for me the question of freedom. The term later refers to the early visits during the 50’s to the atelier of his uncle, the famous photographer Toso Dabac, in the center of Zagreb, from where the,  than young boy has watched the 1^st of May Parade, marching past on the outside, fascinated with the laugh within.

Surrealism and anarchy, however, are not lightly taken as it may appear, just as the tender love stories are not as playful as they look. On the other side of the anarchy we shall frequently find the hypertrophy of order, knowledge and unadmitted  darkness. Just as surrealist writers, writing crazy things in jargon, try to hide their superb knowledge of literature and language, so Petar Dabac, with his seemingly light subjects and arrangements, tries to hide his erudition, his specialized knowledge about old photographic techniques and the history of photography, and his training under the tutelage of one of the most important Croatian photographers.

His anarchic tendency, his inclination toward experimentation and his consistent reluctance to explain his own work do not interfere with the consistence of his diary,

although these same characteristics have sometimes startled the viewers, at least in parts of his works before the diary.

Namely, beginning his career in the photographic workshop of his uncle Toso Dabac,

Petar Dabac had the opportunity to learn from the master. His first portraits, the cycle simply called b/w portraits, which belong to the period between 1959 and late 70’s, the gallery of faces, friends and acquaintances, from the Zagreb artistic scene, where probably the sure way to the affirmation within Zagreb photographic ambience.

However, to that same period belong also his installations, indicatively called Gulliver in the Wonderland from 1971, with ominous male hands protruding from the grass in a public park – related myths of ambiguous children stories about wonders of growing up little girls and paranoidal adventures of men – an hommage to the cult figures of surrealist aesthetics.

Further, to that same decade belong also his experiments with photocopies of photographs, with author’s interventions in colour, as well as his cycle Photograms, made between 1974 and 1979, showing strict geometrical structure as result of laboratory interventions: drawn up networks photographed on graphic film and later developed on colour paper, unique pictures resulting as much from the moves of the developing instruments, as from the experiments with paper for colour photograph, with always present factor of chance. The results were Vasarellian works of glowing colours correspondent to some tendencies in Croatian painting – characteristic which could, in fact, lead to an erroneous judgement about their place within the author’s photographic opus.

To the following decades belong again the two seemingly essentially controversial projects: the cycle The Sense of Nature at the End of the 20^th Century, from 1979, and the series, bearing again the simple title Portraits in Colour, that belongs to the years between 1979 and 1990. The first of these two cycles follows partly the experience of strict geometrical photograms, whether it is a matter of acentric presentations of the sea, grass or ground, or of acentric composition divided simetrically in two horizontal parts – of not necessarily recognizable parts of nature. We could speculate about photography of structures quotation and we could assume a certain restlessness in photographing of nature which – in spite of the formal beauty of these photographs – looses its identity, but it is doubtful whether this would bring us to the right conclusions.

Annie Le Brun is quite right when she says, writing about that work, that this cycle is not about the inspiration with the beauties of nature, or macro photographs, or an interest for structures, but about a different approach, which she calls the mental eye approach. Nobuyoshi Araki describes the same thing as photographing the air between himself and the model; Nan Goldin as relational instead of perceptional approach; Seiichi Furuya as physical photography; and J.H.Lartigue as perception of wonderful harmonies of the moment, experienced in winking of an eye. So, all of them, each in his own way, talk about the same thing, about the experience of nonobservational photography, Photography from within, which subjectivizes the objective, as opposed to photography from without, which implies the superior observer reduced to the role of an intelligent mirror.

This brings us to the observational photography, determining point of all the authors of photographic diaries, about which Petar Dabac says: What I would like the most is some sort of invisible camera. On one hand, because of fear not to appear as a voyeur in the eye of the viewer and on the other hand, because of an greater fear that the viewer might look at the future photographs with the eye of the voyeur.

In his series Portraits in Colour, with the subtitle: Last Years of Companionship – the gallery of friend from art circles, family members, acquaintances from the exhibition openings or from the streets, photographed in a fraction of the moment, the inspired composition of the colours of their clothes, space elements, glasses in their hands, object that surround them, all of this is not an act of manneristic imposition of ornaments on the person, but the comprehensive feeling of harmony between the photographed person, the ambience and the photographer himself, who is included into the scene.

None of the experiments and shifts are accidental. Photograms are, apart from the work by themselves, also the search for amimetic photography, which remains as a constant and which in the early works has been persued to the point of abolishing of the very act of photographing. Photograms are also compositions of colours, not following some previous knowledge of harmony, but determined by an accidental flick of a hand. This experience is later continued in his Portraits in Colour and brought to the extreme abstraction in the series On the Road, where the author, in fact, photographs the reality, but the motion makes it unidentifiable, so that the results are athematical photographs,

similar to the photograms. His Sense of Nature at the End of 20^th Century is on one hand the continuation of the Photogram experience in the feeling of harmonies of elementary geometry, but at the same time, it is also the starting point for the later personified meanings of nature in the series Trees. The experience of the early Black/White Portraits, seemingly perfectly executed and not at all experimental or adventurous, can be seen in the diary as a quotation or a play with stereotypes of classic portrait photography.

Following the logic of different ways of examination of the same traces – even when this may not seem immediately apparent – all these experiences are summarized in his diary project. The diary, continuing the narrative element discovered in his portraits in colour, offers at the same time the perfect form for summarization of photographic interests, which so often seem kaleidoscopic, by placing in the center – and this should not be ignored – the very person of the photographer, emotional and alogical, the source of all these shifts and their interconnection within the person as a whole.

Talking about emotions, the diary line following the love story with the girl with manneristic face is emotionally the strongest. That face, which sometime calls to mind the canons of El Greco’s figures and sometimes becomes hardened into a dark and distrustful expression bordering on ugliness. In comparison with other photographic diaries, this is certainly not the pathetical self-examination of American authoress Nan Goldin, or the addiction to the dark objects of desire and devotion of Japanese authors.

This is not a love story perceived as a heavy mallet of fate, but as a gift, as a story about meetings and partings, tears and kisses, quarrels and making ups, travels and love letters, and the final separation.

The story enfolds in diptychs of girls portraits with camera closing in on her melancholy luminous eyes, in triptychs of tender nude photographs among the bed sheets, the pictures in Paris hotels, the anxious pictures of the girl squatting before flowery wall paper, their photographs together in the moments of love and reconciliation, and finally, in frequent photographs of departures.

The first of the lower sequences in the diary, which have the role of pauses and articulations, are the love letters which gave the diary it’s title: letters which remind us of unpredictable secret messages from school days, of vulgar graffiti, of gay Merovingian manuscripts and singularly written hieroglyphics. The letters surpass the level of personal statement becoming pictographic messages of an independent value.

Letters are just the first of the secretly – public sequences joining together into the line of the love story. The second sequence, lasting from the beginning to the end of the diary, is named Trees – close ups of tree trunks in which we can perceive the forms that belong to an explicitly erotic repertory, what is, anyway, quite openly indicated by the private tone of the title. The trees accompany the love story, sometimes tenderly, sometimes jokingly, sometimes self-ironically, but always as a clear, indirect message. The meanings are gradated, depending on the season in which the photograph is taken – in the spring-time or summer or covered with snow. This sequence functions on one hand as lovers reply and on the other hand, as a photographic jest with minimalistic dramatics of photography of structures.

The third sequence, which accompany both, the love story and the extended family album, can be described as outside voices, most frequently resulting from a quick glance at something that photographer notices while walking by: above the Zagreb poster with a drawing of a man taking of his jacket and rushing off to war, there is a small leaflet with information that the dolls can be bought at the nearby newsstand. On another poster from the same period we read the dramatic invitation to join a vegetarian group’s lectures on reincarnation. To the same sequence belong also the thorn up election posters; the posters on which, true inadvertent interventions of workers pasting up various posters, the part of the text mentioning the voice of the people is joined to the publicity message about the best American diapers; the symbol of swastika on a Berlin van with a sign Fruit and Vegetables; Ljubljana graffiti about throwing the southerners out of Slovenia and German graffiti offering the same procedure for all the foreigners; to the more pacific Italian machines for love tests, following the photographs of the postbox into which the love letter was put a moment ago.

Parallelly to the first, quite private line, accompanied with letters and trees, runs the other one, conditionally named the extended family album, which is indeed just that, if the term “family” is understood in such a way as to include, beside one’s parents, spouse, children and siblings, also one’s friends from coffeehouses. The family is photographed – with one or two exceptions – on trips, at the exhibition openings, while preparing festive family meals and during various family festivities.

Zagreb is appearing in the cycles related to the particular coffee bars in the town centre, where the author is not the photographer-tourist, but the part of the regular crowd. Quick shots of friends from artistic circles and childhood friends are mixed with photographs of local thugs, eccentrics, drifters and lost existences washed by tide of hopelessness in and out of the city, waitresses, reflections in the mirrors of people around tables, figures walking away on the night pavements.

The town, which is a commonplace in all photographic diaries, here is first of all Zagreb, not in panoramic views of town architecture, but as a town of apartments, coffee bars, places where friends meet. Graz is also appearing, again not as a notice about the town, but as the meeting place of friends. Tokyo enters with shots of streets and architecture, but also with scenes in coffee houses, where we recognize the vehement gesture of Nobuyoshi Araki. Indescribable Harkov is the Harkov of Boris Mihailov and Roman Piatkovka.

However, the town as architectural and cultural symbol, disintegrates in the side series named On the Road, in the sequence of photographs shot with the long exposition from moving car, on which the towns, lights and clouds are whooshing by in the indeterminable sfumato, turning into total abstraction, wherein the town remains only the sign in a mysterious composition of transient streaks of light – as nostalgic messages of towns that we shall never have the chance to visit.

In contrast to travels and animated scenes of festivities, stand the quiet home scenes: lyrical blond-wood table with tender flowers; the room with the ray of light; sick father staring above the bright yellow tablecloth and the bird’s-eye view of small, spent body of dead mother lying in one of conjugal beds, unnoticeable at first within the firm order of the middle-class conjugal bedroom – inserted without any warning into the sequence of photographs of parties, travels and love follies.

To this line of death shall belong also, as a convert symbol, the accompanying motive of swans, to which Petar Dabac returns, or the direct sequence of photographs of tombstones under the title Numbers, another cycle in which the author displays a sequence of nine close ups of old headstones in the cemetery of island Hvar, bearing no names, as a surrealistic rhyme on numbers one to nine, while in the place of number ten stands the fresco painting from the belfry: a mischieviously laughing dead scull – the interpretation of death, another commonplace of all diaries, equally important as love, Eros, the town motive or the motive of self-portraits.

The personal colour of this diary is in this equivocal message from the island church tower that summarizes the agony, drama, funerals and photographs of the dead, in spite of the fact that the diary was made in the time of war; in the way in which the author delegates the mysteries and pitfalls of Eros to the language of trees, and absolves the passionate struggle with the shackles of parental love – characteristical, for instance, for the work of Nan Goldin – with one, vaguely amusing photograph of the :idle European old lady, author’s grandmother, with added cartoon-like balloon enclosing the text expressing old lady’s firm, although comical opinion: I have two sons. One is a gentleman and another is photographer. The gentleman son is author’s father, the other is his uncle, the best known and, by the way, very successful Croatian photographer, who taught Petar Dabac the art of photography. In the world of Petar Dabac, the drama of photography as fatal, soul robbing devil’s play with mirrors is reduced to this comical statement of his Granny.

Finally, let us mention the fact that diary Lieber Pero continues after  1995. It is possible to assume that its form will remain the permanent choice of the author, for whom it is already evident that he is the kind of author who refuses drama as the fundamental aspect of the world and does not understand his profession as the mission. However, his gentle humour , unexplicit and discernible only in the atmosphere, should not mislead us. This is an essentially dualistic world, so that the experience of darkness is much more intimate than it seems. Kaleidoscope is, after all, the toy, in which the smallest, accidental move changes the pattern, and the chance element in this play of multicoloured pieces of glass and mirror is subject to a higher law with rules which may only seem decorative at the first glance.