Page 9 - Stari Grad izmedu tame i svjetla / Stari Grad from Dusk to Daybreak

Tonko Maroević
STONE NEST

Stari Grad sequences by Pawel Jaroszewski.

Melancholic and astonishing scenes with pristine deposits are presented to us.
We are faced with details and wholes of a certain milieu that jealously guards its own core

created owing to work of many generations, imbued with traces of ephemerality and
signs of resistance to creation. Eyes of the viewers prone to contemplation encounter
black and white photos that draw us into dark corners of an ambience only to extract
inner shine from them, and to emphasize glow of the work invested into their creation
to continue and prolong life. What we see is a portrait of a stone nest, of evidently rational
organization, crystallization, but also exceptional and well-preserved emotional warmth.

Night scenes of emptied streets and squares, yards and meadows, and coast definitely
offer a certain metaphysical atmosphere, something between dream and reality, half
way between amazement and slight chill.
Nonactual and out-of-time shots, taken mostly without residents and visitors seem to
present some general, emblematic Mediterranean town, and emphasized chiaro-scuro
elevates them beyond the ordinary and everyday life to the sphere of Manichaean po-
larization of beauty and threat of degradation; contrast of elementary purification and
decadent saturation.
The power of a photograph is in making the unknown seem familiar, and the known

mysterious and less recognizable, in this case we have the photos by Pawel Jaroszewski,
all taken in Stari Grad on the island of Hvar, that doubtlessly depict views and panora-
mas of a quite specific site. However, objectivity or neutrality of these photos is creatively
filtered by a subjective experience of the author, from mere documentary record to

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