Belgrade Raw » Luka Knežević-Strika

Luka Knežević-Strika — Tue, 18 May 2010 21:03:35 +0000

Check out our latest weekly photo-blog

Weekly photo-blog #14

Luka Knežević-Strika — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:27:38 +0000

Winter turns to summer turns to winter turns to spring. While eagerly awaiting for arrival of some good cherries at the markets, we present you another issue of our photo-blog.

Photo: Milovan Milenković

Photo: Darko Stanimirović

Photo: Nemanja Knežević

Photo: Andrej Filev

Photo: Luka Knežević – Strika

Training

Luka Knežević-Strika — Sun, 16 May 2010 19:37:06 +0000

“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.”

Winston Churchill

The above series of photos was taken during training sessions of FBK Beograd, a floorball club from Belgrade. Floorball is a quickly-developing sport and it basically is very much like ice-hockey, without the ice and with a ball instead of a puck. It is very popular in northern Europe and the number of people actively training it there has surpassed those training ice-hockey. In Serbia, it is still a rather unpopular (or even unheard of) sport, but there is a national league with 4 clubs, all from Belgrade. Fbk Beograd finnished last this season but are passionately training and striving, if not for perfection, than at least for that 3rd place in their play-off match against Partizan.*

*this was true at the time of writing. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen.

Some fanfare

Luka Knežević-Strika — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:19:05 +0000

(photographers photographed and vice versa)

We’re happy to announce that we’ve been quite successful in this years Press Photo Serbia competition. Darko has won a special jury award for his series of Roma portraits (Gazela youngsters – our latest photo feature) and Luka has 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 have been selected for the exhibition, including a selection of photos from his Belgrade Raw feature - Biden meets Belgrade. Nemanja was also represented with 4 photos from his trip to United States last summer and we’ve had a pleasure to preview the book Acdcnyc he made from the photos from the trip. I’m sure we would’ve had the pleasure to see some of Andrej’s works at the exhibition, too, but he missed the whole thing, submissions and the show – we’re starting to miss him, so maybe it’s time to come back from London, as nice as it may be.

(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).

Weekly photo blog #10

Luka Knežević-Strika — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:25:09 +0000

Andrej still in London, Nemanja in Poland, sent a train photo he had taken while departing, I was in the village of Bukovac, so we’re mostly out of Belgrade; yet, some travel-flavoured photos are still in for the showing. Cheers!

Photo: Luka Knežević-Strika

Photo: Nemanja Knežević

Photo: Darko Stanimirović

Photo: Milovan Milenkovic

Weekly photo-blog #8

Luka Knežević-Strika — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:36:48 +0000

Busy weekend behind us, we were preparing submissions for Press Photo Serbia and it’s a mighty tedious process. Andrej is in London now, and is going to go to Third Floor Gallery in Cardiff some time soon, where he’ll meet the legendary photographer Joni Karanka. Expect seeing new Belgrade Raw stickers around town soon and some new features on the website, too!

Photo: Luka Knežević-Strika

Photo: Milovan Milenkovic

Photo: Darko Stanimirović

Photo: Nemanja Knežević

Weekly photo-blog 2

Luka Knežević-Strika — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:14:59 +0000

Photo: Željko Naić

Photo: Nemanja Knežević

Photo: Andrej Filev

Photo: Darko Stanimirović

Photo: Luka Knežević-Strika

Photo: Milovan Milenkovic

About Willy Ronis and a certain nude

Luka Knežević-Strika — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:47:41 +0000

Browsing through Willy Ronis’ (the recently passed Mr Ronis was my favourite French photographer, I really enjoy the pitch of his photos if there is such a thing; you could say I just fell for his voice) monograph (Taschen 2009) I noticed a nude of his wife that reminded me of a girl I know. It is a very intimate photo and besides the resemblance of the girls, it somehow felt close to me. I felt the urge to try and recreate that photo, similar maybe to the way that smaller bands make covers of famous songs. I was thinking of a location that would be suitable and once I ended up at the one that I expected to be great and once I started setting up the scene, I found how little things about the original photo started to overwhelm me - the quality and nuances of light, the model position, the angle of shooting; it all started to jump at me more vividly than during any inside-the-mind-only analysis of a photo I’ve ever done. It inspired me to give interpretations and provide visual codes that would replace any of the missing pieces of the original photo that I could spot and after the whole shooting, I somehow really felt exhausted in the best way possible. I don’t know if the result is interesting, any comments are most appreciated, but I’ll be happy to make more of these covers/tributes/photocopies whenever something involves me in such a way.

Ronis:

(Deena Reading)

Luka:

(Jelena reading)

PS Willy Ronis passed away days after I made this photocopy. I hope he would have seen it as a tribute;

Anja in Belgrade

Luka Knežević-Strika — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:00:02 +0000

Anja (short for Andjelija) is a seven year old girl from the village of Bukovac, near Novi Sad. She really is an exceptional kid – check out some of her drawings on flickr. Anja has a sister who lives in Belgrade and has come to visit her several times during the past year. This series of photographs is aimed at showing her experiences in Belgrade and I hope it’ll also emit some of the diverse emotions and the spirit she always radiates.

Flashback – a project by Palo Markovic

Luka Knežević-Strika — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:19:35 +0000

This is a project by a Slovakian photographer Palo Markovic. He created it at a photographic exhibition “Fall of Communism”, which was staged on a couple of public squares in Bratislava. He posed people in front of the photographs thus including them to the events originally portrayed. The original exhibition presented photographs that have been made in the autumn of 1989, during the social changes that took place in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania.

This is how Palo describes his project:

“I’ve been confronted once again with situations that happened 20 years ago when the edge of history made a cut one more time. It was the revolutionary autumn of 1989 when people behind the iron curtain had met in the streets and demanded change. My generation had been too young to be allowed to participate. Me and my mates were watching those events like tourists in own country. And these memories now return as flashes in the dark, revealing obscure development of history in time.”

Palo also organised a guerilla marketing action, attaching a poster for his project (shown above) to the original billboard for the exhibition.

Palo can be found at http://www.lightstalkers.org/palomarkovic