24. Welcome to Dubrovnik - Turistička zajednica grada Dubrovnika

The Photographic Eye of
Najka
Mirković
Dubrovnik must
give of itself
Najka Mirković
was born in
Bratislava. Since
her early childhood she has
been living in Dubrovnik,
where she attended the
grammar school and
graduated from the Faculty
of Tourism and Foreign Trade.
In 1986 she completed a
photography course, and since
then photography has become
one of the major interests in
her life, both in the professional
and private sense. She has
conducted a number of wellreceived
photography workshops,
and has taken part as an associate
of the Dubrovnik Museums’
Archaeological Department in
photographing historical artefacts.
Since 2002, she has had one-man
exhibitions in Dubrovnik, Split,
Zagreb and Mostar.
It was Najka Mirković’s family
that encouraged her early interest in
photography as an artistic expression
of her own personality. The mood
and atmosphere of Dubrovnik and its
surroundings provide the source for the
motifs of her photographs. She discovers
a specific quality in every-day, simple
and ordinary things, using
photography to get us to see
things we fail to notice in our
superficial times. She shows us
the seemingly familiar in a way we
have never experienced before. Delving
into the very essence of an object and
revealing it by means of her astute mind
is characteristic of the style of this artist,
not only in her photography, but also in
her way of thinking and her perception
of the world.
Your intriguing approaches to
your subject in almost all the
cycles of your photographic work
have been determined by your
extremely emotional perception of
Dubrovnik…
As a photographer I am constantly deeply
aware of Dubrovnik’s ancient history and
tradition, and of the power and beauty of its
natural atmosphere. I rejoice in discovering
new aspects of this harmony over and over
again. Every step in understanding the
aesthetics, mystery, balance and energy which
Dubrovnik definitely still possesses brings
me closer to discovering the harmony within
myself. Whether it’s a question of my series
of photographs of motifs from the Franciscan
Monastery Cloister with the wealth of
human faces and stone figures I captured
there, my landscape photographs exploring the
Island of Šipan’s countryside in all seasons,
photographs of the Festival of St Blaise and
the emotions it arouses reflected on people’s
44 Dobrodošli u Dubrovnik Zima 2012./13.