From the Mona Lisa to the Selfie

It is a good thing that five centuries ago people knew nothing about aesthetic medicine, selfies and TikTok. Otherwise some pouting Mona Lisa would be hanging in the Louvre today, and visitors would be laughing at her. As it is, Leonardo da Vinci created a masterpiece by immortalising the natural beauty and the discreet smile of a woman who still moves people and inspires artists.

The Mona Lisa resists the contemporary fashion for pouted lips on the solemn faces of women, young women and girls, who put a mask on their face and try to hide their soul, their heart and their mind behind it. They offer the world an artificial version of themselves, a version that does not exist.

That is why the task of a true photographer is to use light and instinct to clear away that fog of untruth from the face in front of the camera — to catch the reflections of the soul in the eye and the lines of a life on the face, and so to immortalise natural beauty, outer and inner alike.

On the photographs of Slobodan Ivetić

The academician and writer Dušan Kovačević on the work of Slobodan Ivetić: “Slobodan graduated in film directing and photography at the Academy in Paris, and that fact matters for his visual sensibility when it comes to the pictures we call photographs.

Several times I suggested that he should open an art photography gallery, but Slobodan never wanted to turn his love into a profession. Photography was, and has remained, a great and pure love for him. Many of his photographs will stand as testimony that we once did something beautiful, and that we were young.”