How can contemporary photography be critical without becoming a medium of affective spectacle? Can it stay within the domain of realistic representation of contemporary society, but distance itself from journalism and documentary practice and exist independently within the field of contemporary art? Is it capable of knowing and respecting its own tradition as a medium without being restricted to the semantically bare formalism? An entire series of authors have dealt with these topics, prominent among whom is the American photographer and theorist Allan Sekula with his photographic and theoretical oeuvre. The term critical realism^[1] was introduced into theoretical discourse of contemporary photography precisely through his work. Theoreticians adopted the term from the field of philosophy and sociology, but when it came to art history they moved away from historical complexity of the concept of realism and the stylistic connotations it carries. In the context of contemporary artistic production, the concept of critical realism is primarily related to the method of artistic research that analytically and critically reflects the reality it depicts. Ever since the 1970s, Sekula insisted on the possibility of social importance of photography, basing his strategy on an understanding that art is a mode of human communication, a discourse anchored in concrete social relationships, and not “a vaporous realm of purely affective expression and experience.”^[2]Understanding photography as a social and cultural practice is therefore immanent to this approach, and aimed at encouraging dialogue outside the realm of art itself, while maintaining distance from the manipulative pseudo-political engagements.   

Long standing work of the Split-based author Duška Boban can precisely be contextualized within this complex configuration of form and content. From the early 2000s, through her artistic and activist practice, particularly related to the preservation of the cultural landscape of Marjan Forest Park, she carefully documents and critically considers her immediate environment – the city that is depleting its natural, urban and cultural resources and, just as importantly, its citizens, under the ruthless dictate of capital and private interests. Precisely from the position of a citizen who actively lives and loves her city, Duška Boban turns towards Split’s problematic, painful points, honestly believing in the importance of bringing attention to the problem and the possibility for positive change. In that sense, her activity in civil initiatives is inseparable from her artistic work and represents the belief, increasingly rare in today’s world, that art truly has the power to change the world. Using photography as the primary artistic medium, the author perceives it within the aforementioned discourse of critical realism, as a way of thinking about, a method of critically reading the social reality of the city that surrounds her. In a very specific manner she references neglected spaces, abandoned locations, segments of urban memory relinquished to oblivion that are slowly disappearing from the city’s contemporary identity.    

In her newest project, she is examining the heritage of the shipbuilding industry in Split and possibilities of its presentation in the contemporary museum context. However, before we delve into the project Amorella – A Floating City, we should briefly consider its thematic and methodological genesis within the author’s earlier oeuvre. As early as the series of photographic collages from 2008 entitled Suburban Herbarium, Duška Boban demonstrated an inclination towards the perception of urbanity removed from the common, widely recognizable places and images presented to tourists. Not necessarily understanding the suburban as a geographic determination, but as a peripheral condition of urbanity that could, because of the transitional characteristic of time and space, be transposed to the historic nucleus of the city,^[3] the author expressed a specific understanding of the city as a living organism. She built compositions with photographic fragments in which, more than the mere representation of place, she conveyed their character that Ivana Meštrov, author of the exhibition catalogue text, correctly detected as an example of Debordian psycho-geography.^[4] Further developing the affinity towards the marginal, Duška Boban presented her long-term exploration of the neglected architectural and cultural heritage in the photographic exhibition entitled Split*** Three Stars, displayed in the Salon Galić Gallery in 2017. On this occasion there was no digital manipulation of photography and the author, through a very atmospheric, simple, “quiet” analogue photography conjured the frozen time of abandoned and/or devastated spaces of Villa Dalmacija, Dalmacijavino building, and the commercial-sports Koteks-Gripe Complex. She communicated the significance and value of presented spaces, and ideas about the possibilities of their future public functions with textual segments, publications and discursive materials that motivated the public to actively express their opinion.  

Duška Boban applies the said strategy in her newest project entitled Amorella – A Floating City. Thematically she focuses on the ample heritage of the shipbuilding industry that had largely contributed, particularly in the latter part of the 20^th century, to defining Split as a contemporary city. Currently, when the shipbuilding industry is painfully disappearing from the Croatian economic map, the author turns towards the emergent problem of preservation, interpretation and presentation of its heritage, specifically the potential of its active role in the creation of a new urban cultural identity. Besides photography, which is the primary focus of this text, the author develops the project further, together with Nikola Bajto, whose research as well as a report from the voyage aboard Amorella, strengthens the educational and discursive potential of the project’s visual segment.   

The first series titled A Floating City is composed of 33 photographs of ship models that represent only some of the ships built in the Split shipyard between 1937 and 2012. The displayed models were once part of the Brodosplit Museum collection and are presently owned by Brodosplit – DIV Group company. Adopting the archival and museological methods, Duška Boban decided to present the photographed material in a form that simulates a museum display. Photos of the models taken always from the same angle mimic a museum catalogue and through elimination of any other visual content but the model itself, focus the observer’s gaze exclusively on that primary motif. The character of the models is further highlighted with the choice of a neutral grey background and printing the photographs on an aluminium composite material, by which the author emphasizes the objectness of the photograph and associates it with the industrial source of the models on display. With an ostensible neutrality of the photographic image the author directs our attention to the examination of details, textures, colours, deciphering various titles that, by association, introduce a narrative about the diversity and importance of the former industry. However, in order to avoid that the content remains at an experiential level alone, the photographs are accompanied by texts compiled by Nikola Bajto, which take the form of interpretational museum texts and explain the history, or better yet, destinies of the presented ships. Consequently, the importance and versatility of the former industrial production is thus shown in an unobtrusive manner, but supported with a host of visual and textual information. In addition, the unique value of the displayed ship models is clearly stated as well.   

Owing to such an approach, Duška Boban’s project can be positioned in the context of increasingly relevant contemporary artistic practices that use archival and museological strategies to speak about specific segments of the imperilled social memory. As early as 2004, and referring to Derrida’s “archive fever”^[5], American art historian and theoretician Hal Foster articulated these artistic practices with the term archival impulse.^[6] Foster therefore explains that the need of an artist to make historical information present through found objects, images or texts and to open their way towards new, active contemporary interpretations, appears at a particular moment when that same information is imperilled and degraded or completely disappeared. Can we interpret Duška Boban’s decision to address the heritage of the shipbuilding industry in that context? If we take into consideration the current availability and presentation of this important heritage, an affirmative answer is inevitable.        

As previously stated, the photographed ship models were part of the former Brodosplit Museum. From sparse published sources^[7] we find out that Brodosplit Museum operated within SOUR Brodograđevna industrija Split company from 1987, whose basic mission was to present the history of shipbuilding industry in Split from its beginnings to the foundation of the museum. In her text, Eli Pecotić states that the museum was the result of long-term efforts and need for such a presentation because it showcased the potential and achievements of the shipyard at the time. Today, we could read it as a sort of three-dimensional reference book for prospective clients. It is interesting to point out, from our current position, that representation of the then production programme was not problematic because ship models were built in parallel with the newbuildings. What was then a standard, no longer exists today. The model workshop inside the shipyard was shuttered, and models are now rarely made, and even if they are, they are made in China and their appearance and technology is far removed from the manufactured models shown in Duška Boban’s photographs. Regrettably, the original ambition behind the foundation of Brodosplit Museum disappeared during the war and post-war years, the museum as an institution was never registered in the new state, and its collection was never fully professionally examined and protected. The material is today the property of Brodosplit company, and is still kept in the same space but is available to the public by prior appointment only. Some models were loaned to the Croatian Maritime Museum in Split in 2009, for the exhibition Od bracere do tankera: splitska brodogradnja u 19. i 20. stoljeću, however after the shipyard was sold to the new owner they were returned. Which leads us to another problem of preservation and presentation of this exceptionally important heritage. The Croatian Maritime Museum in Split was founded in 1997, as a successor of former maritime museums (primarily the Maritime and Military-Maritime Museum),^[8] and today functions as a city museum institution situated in the Gripe Fortress. Considering the value and number of objects that the museum keeps and expertly presents, its location and number of professional employees is not commensurate with its importance. For this reason, the idea of a contemporary Museum of the Sea, advocated through this project by Duška Boban, that would be located in the port of Split seems a necessary and important topic in the contemporary reading of this seminal heritage and in order to strengthen the maritime urban identity that is today, indeed, in danger of complete marginalization.            

Part of the appeal of artistic work is hidden behind the freedom of choice of methods and forms that the artist can use in order to convey their ideas to the public. Therefore, unburdened by museological demands, Duška Boban presents, together with photographs of ship models, a separate series of photographs that were taken late last year aboard Amorella, the ship that was built in the Brodosplit shipyard in 1988, and still sails between the cities of Stockholm and Turku. The author addresses the public on a personal level, because Amorella represents a symbol of the former city that eagerly followed this achievement of the local shipbuilding industry, as it also represented a link to the then contemporary Western world. Because of the way the photos were taken, even the public that does not remember the ship can read in them a memory of times gone by. This is a very personal photographic essay that rejects the documentary approach to photography because in her photographic images, even though they follow temporal and geographic changes the ship goes through, the author emphasizes a particularly poetic quality, not without a dose of sentimentality. She records Amorella’s everyday life, but primarily explores traces of memory of the time and place that show the ship’s origin. With this conceptual reversal and freedom of artistic expression, the author manages to accomplish that which the museum practice struggles with – to be removed from the classical presentation of objects and to engage the audience on a personal level.   

Through this dynamic exchange of the personal and collective, the poetic and scientific approach in her project Amorella – A Floating City, Duška Boban clearly forces us, the audience, into a situation where those of us who still possess a personal memory of this heritage, have to think about ways of avoiding the future where that same heritage will be read by future generations as a mere historization of the past, with no connection to the new social reality. We should therefore remember Walter Benjamin’s words that Allan Sekula quotes in the introduction to his essay “Photography between labor and capital”: 

“For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”^[9]

Jasminka Babić

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^[1] Jan Baetens & Hilde Van Gelder (ed.) Critical Realism in Contemporary Art: Around Allan Sekula’s Photography, Leuven University Press, 2008

^[2] Allan Sekula. Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation) The Massachusetts Review Vol. 19, No. 4, Photography (Winter, 1978), pp. 859-883

^[3] Ivana Meštrov. Suburban Herbarium of Duške Boban or a Visual Chronicle of a City. In: Duška Boban: Suburban Herbarium. Exhibition catalogue. Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts HAZU, Split, 2008, p. 9

^[4] ibid. p. 12.

^[5] In his text Jacques Derrida epitomizes the change of traditional perception of the archive as a closed repository of the past into an understanding of the archive as a dynamic category, both in the process of its creation, and in the possibilities of interpretation. See: Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. In Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), p. 10. Original title: Mal d’archive: Une impression freudienne. Éditions Galilée, Pariz, 1995 

^[6] Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse”, October 110, Fall 2004, 3

^[7] Eli Pecotić. Muzej Brodosplit – od ideje do realizacije. In: Informatica museologica, Vol. 20 No. 1-2, 1989.

^[8] www.hpms.hr [accessed on 30 March 2019]

^[9] Walter Benjamin: Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), in: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, (New York, 1969), p. 255 

translation: Robertina Tomić