Photographing Poverty

Random images: rainy-pavement Moore Street as a Chinese man lights a cigarette among the vegetable debris; a man’s hand crunched onto a steel hospital crutch that bears the word “sunrise”; an empty bar with sunlight spewing in a window, falling on a crumpled tee-shirt.

Just some of the moments captured by photographer Dragana Jurisic, Croatian by birth and Dubliner by chance, after she visited Ireland nine years ago, and ended up staying. Her photography is visceral, emotive and yet detached: she wants to embrace a scene and deliver it back, in all its glorious and tawdry detail, for the viewer to savour or dismiss. She doesn’t mind which because it’s what she does, regardless.
“It’s a way of ordering the chaos,” she says, intense dark eyes scanning the horizon over Dublin Bay. “Very emotional scenes can be placed into something that is in a way, orderly. It’s making sense of the world by taking a certain moment out of it.”
Dragana’s work can be seen on her website (draganaphoto.com), her blog (photoblog.com/Dragana) and a stunning book she published last November, entitled Seeing Things. Now, a year later, she’s planning to re-launch a revised version of the book, in a limited edition that she envisages as an art work in itself.
The availability of her work online is something that many artists would shy from, but she sees it as a natural process: “There is no sense in being proprietary about photos. I take them, but I want to share them. When you take a photo, you have to be able to put it out into the world without getting something back from it.”
Dragana comes to photography naturally, since her father was also a snapper.
“I was about six or seven when my father showed me how to work in the dark room,” she remembers. But when a bomb fell on the family house in Croatia and destroyed most of her father’s work in one flaming swoop, that changed. “He took one more picture after that – a photo of our house after it had burned down – for insurance purposes; but that was about it. He never photographed again. It was as if I began to take photos when he stopped.”
Dragana studied Psychology as her undergraduate degree. Interestingly, it was in the Croatian student psychology publication, Kacot, an anti-establishment review, that her photos were first published. She eventually left Croatia for Prague when she was 25, and from there found herself in Dublin in 1999. Graduating with a Master’s in Photography from Newport University in Wales, she was commissioned in 2006 by Ireland’s Combat Poverty agency to document the subject of poverty in Ireland. This resulted in a stunning body of work that blends poignant detail with documentary objectivity, charting a Dublin that the Celtic Tiger would prefer to brush under its expensive new veneer. With their stark realism, Dragana’s works remind us not to get too complacent.
She has exhibited in group shows in the UK, Wales and Ireland, and is currently absorbed with a number of projects, including a solo show for 2009.
She stands on the edge of the pier in Dun Laoghaire, near where she lives, and contemplates a velvet autumnal seascape. The end of summer reminds her of the first day of the war in her homeland, when she was evacuated, along with her neighbours, into a shopping mall where the evacuees’ only respite was lightweight looting of the shops.
“I remember sipping champagne, and sharing a makeshift bed with a boy I had a crush on, while we watched the ‘fireworks’ of the city under fire,” she says. “It’s a funny thing the way you remember the happier moments from that time – despite what was happening. If you couldn’t do that, then I think you would go mad.”
Perhaps it’s this that has prompted her to find the poetry of places that most people pass without noticing, to seeing the emotion in the details of daily existence.
“In a way,” she notes, “photography is like writing with light… one frame transfers the emotion of that moment.”