Page 10 - Stari Grad izmedu tame i svjetla / Stari Grad from Dusk to Daybreak

personal interpretation of insatiable love for lights and shadows of the beloved area
adopted through experience. A longstanding guest, almost a pilgrim to Stari Grad, felt the
need to record his vision of the main points of the urban rhythm, and to offer something
in return for gladly accepted visual and synestethic impulses.

Although we have seen these places for hundreds of times, the joy of discovering and
recognizing motifs in these photos is quite unique. Jaroszewski skillfully uses the existing
sources of light, for instance flashing and flickering of old lanterns on the relief of coarse
walls or on the beaten, polished and therefore shiny squares of the street pavement. He

is just as interested in the horizon in twilight and sunrise illumination that spreads evenly
on peaceful, tousled clouds and then reflects dispersedly on the entire landscape and its
surroundings. This inspired photographer manages to give all the chosen scenes right
measure of the seen and the anticipated, and to emphasize some visual highlights, while
using something like a veil to cover the surroundings wherefrom the shot was extracted.
Thus instead of inventorying monuments and registering data, he creates an appealing
atmosphere, suggests genius loci, constitutes spiritual space where he obviously works

with the invisible, and the known relies on the help from the hidden.

For all of us who have become related to most objects in the photos, it is a great pleas-
ure to follow Pawel Jaroszewski to Sveti Stipon or Sveti Petar, to enter Tvardoj or Škor, to
stroll in Srinja or Donja Kola, and see it all in a new light. It is not related to the fact that
a foreigner shows it to us, but that an artist offers us his perspective, distancing from the
object in order to perceive it in a more autonomous and authentic way, alienating or even
positively peculiar. Stari Grad can be photogenic and it is a very attractive motif for photo-
graphs, paintings, or simple daydreaming and it has had a number of visual, factographic

and even film presentations and interpretations, but few artists such as Pawel Jaroszewski
knew how to feel its completeness and deliver it to us with an amazement of a discoverer.
We have a reason to be amazed at the result, to experience our town as nothing less than
a wonder, and to be grateful to Pavel Jaroszewski for this experience.

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