Jelena Mijić

Dejan Golić

Dušan Rajić

Mane Radmanović

Even when we were just contemplating founding Belgrade Raw, or rather, founding something, because there wasn’t even a name or a clear idea what would it be, it was our goal to discover like-minded photographers who chose Belgrade as their everyday playground. It’s been a few years and we’re happy to report we have found five more. We hope that their photographic vision presented in the context of Belgrade Raw finds you wanting more.

The first chance to really enjoy their photographs will be the exhibition opening on May 9th, at the Artget gallery in Belgrade. As you may have read here, we were invited to curate the Artget gallery in 2013. Belgrade Raw: New Members will be the first exhibition of many to come for the rest of the year, as part of the “Raw Season”. (The detailed program for the season and Photo-Fair, which also starts on May 9th, will be announced soon).

We have also started adding (and will add a lot more) the new members’ works to our photos section, so make sure to visit there as well.

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In other news, we are currently on show in Belgrade, and at the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art no less!  The occasion is the second edition of Photo-documents, an exhibition of contemporary Serbian documentary-rooted art photography, curated by  Miroslav Karić, Sladjana Petrović Varagić and Una Popović. We have presented ourselves with a large wall-sized installation, with many prints of various sizes.

Photo: Milan Kralj (more photos of the entire show here)

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Rostfrei publishing, a young publishing house from Slovenia, approached us with the idea of the first Belgrade Raw book. So far we can’t say much, but we will post updates to our blog as we are able.

Ever since we formed in 2009, we had the idea of doing a book. A real one, with 500+ copies, hard-cover, the one people can buy as a present, an art piece, a souvenir and all that. Doing such a book on our own was clearly impossible, or nearly impossible at best, so we never took it too serious – but sort of kept dreaming.

We were quite thrilled when Rostfrei Publishing – or to be more precise, Jaka Babnik, one of the founders of Rostfrei – approached us.

Here is us, with Jaka, looking at sample cover sheets, over beer and coffee.

Looking at different cover sheets for our book

So far we can only say the book will have over hundred pages, hard-cover with cloth. If all goes well, we should have it by the end of the year or so.

For other info, follow our blog

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Happy new year and marry Christmas from Belgrade Raw

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In September 2011, we had our first comprehensive exhibition. It took place in Regensburg, Germany, in an unusual venue for exhibitions – a shopping mall.

When we were approached by Miroslav Karic, a curator from Belgrade’s Remont gallery, to be included in his selection of artists representing Serbia at the Donumenta Festival in Regensburg, we were intrigued and thankful for the opportunity. The huge space that is the hall of Donau Einkaufs Zentrum mall presented a challenge, since we had to find a way to fill the 250 square meters enclosed by the movable walls that constituted our exhibition space. We decided to use a large number of prints (presenting a main Belgrade Raw edit and also 5 more or less independent projects by each of us) and also to dedicate a part of the space to a slide show room, where we presented constantly updated work from the Belgrade Raw Flickr group pool.

We’d like to thank Regina Hellwig-Schmid and the whole Donumenta team for helping set the exhibition just the way we hoped we would.

The exhibition itself was, in my opinion, a success, we had a lavish opening, with free cocktails all night and a varied buffet. It has to do something with the venue being a shopping mall. But when I thought about it, there is no downside, really, at least when you have in mind the type of work we were showing. We had a big, well-lit space, with a huge amount of people passing by everyday, many of them stopping and taking a look, even before we finished setting up. Another interesting thing which I haven’t thought about much beforehand is that this wasn’t your usual “gallery audience”. They are regular people, and putting aside the fact that I haven’t been too happy to spend 3-4 days in the mall setting the whole thing up, I think it was a great opportunity for us to reach this sort of audience and I was really happy for it. But, enough with the rant, here are some photos from the setup, opening, as well as of the actual exhibition and also expect to see a feature made of photos that Andrej and me made on our day-trip to Munich.

Veronika and Andrej setting up the wall with his project from Wien.

Andrej at work (that’s Darko’s Roma Youngsters series)

An interesting ray on light on a photo from Luka’s series Suburbs.

The main Belgrade Raw room, featuring a gigantic print of Andrej’s photo of an angry dog in a car.

A curious observer in the Belgrade Raw room (before the setup was finished).

One of the walls of the exhibition

The opening speech by the mall’s director

Crowd at the opening

Andrej’s series from a tombolo at a Serbian Community Center in Wien.

A bunch of small prints that served as an invitation/peek to the projection room.

In a separate room photos from our Flickr pool were being projected.

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• We’re now officially registered as a Non-profit ogranisation.  We have a stamp and all. Hooray! Hopefully, this will give us more of a chance to realize some of the offline projects we’ve been thinking about for a while.
• We took part in a Fotoforum talk at Students’ city in Belgrade, where we had a nice talk with Ivan Petrović, who did an excellent job preparing the whole talk, the slideshow. It was a very novel and good experience for us and the audience seemed to enjoy it, too – there’s even a blog post (check it out, it’s in Serbian, but there are  also photos) by Dejan Danailov, a photographer/blogger based in Belgrade. You’ll see a couple of our snaps from that night below, too
• We are finally taking part in our first proper exhibition! (hopefully). We have been invited by a curator from “Remont” gallery, Miroslav Karić to participate in Donumenta, which is an art-show held every year in the German city of Regensburg,  where art of countries of the Danube region is presented. This year, it is focused on Serbia. We are all set to participate, but are still not sure if we will have the funding to produce our exhibition (we have been offered a huge 200 square meter space inside a mall there). If you now someone or a company that would like to help with this, please e-mail us at contact@belgraderaw.com

Nemanja, Darko and Andrej at Fotoforum, also a glimpse of an audience.

Nemanja as a lead vocal, Darko and Andrej assisting.

Nemanja, Miroslav Karic and Ivan Petrovic after the Fotoforum talk.

We hope you enjoy the double photo-blog post bellow, and expect (a lot) more from us soon!

The post Report and plans appeared first on Belgrade Raw.

Here is an excerpt:

DŽKC club (photo: Michael Bowring)

Stray dogs (photo: Michael Bowring)

Don’t forget to check out other photographs he’s put up on his blog too, and read his comments—they are far from being a foreigner’s stereotypes, and still on healthy distance from a local’s patriotic-fueled ones.

The post Disappearing Belgrade, by Michael Bowring appeared first on Belgrade Raw.

It is already put in it’s place, in the Cultural Center GRAD and was printed at home, plasticized and then we drilled holes, put in a couple of rings as binding and a chain to prevent people from taking it home. Currently an edition of one, but we hope to make more of them and spread around the city.

If you are interested in having a Belgrade Raw book in your bar/pub/center, or know a patron that might be, don’t hesitate to contact us. In any case, head out to Grad and check it out. We hope the chain will hold and it’ll still be there when you come.

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We’re happy to announce that we’ve been quite successful in this year’s Press Photo Serbia competition.

Darko won a special jury award for his series of Roma portraits, called Gazela youngsters, and Luka won an award for best photo in the “Art” category for this photo from the festival Kids’ Patch. At least a dozen of Milovan’s photos were selected for the exhibition, including a couple from his series Biden meets Belgrade. Nemanja was also represented with 4 photos from his trip to United States last summer and we had a pleasure to preview the book Acdcnyc he made from the photos from the trip.

Master of photography and martial arts – Darko demonstrating some of the moves he learned while photographing the Roma portraits

We are also happy to congratulate Sanja Knezevic on winning the Grand Prix of the competition and Matt Luton of Dvafoto for the prize for the best photo in the “News” category.

The exhibition itself is an improvement over the last, at least I feel so. Less cheap shots and less politics related stuff (probably some connection there) and more involved and long-lasting personal projects. All in all I think it’s quite worth a look (it’s currently in Belgrade’s Artget gallery on the Republic Square and it’s going to travel around Serbia in the following months).

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