The islanders of Pag are maybe/probably/certainly Martians

Skill in describing nature may well depend on verbal wealth, but all the expressive richness of a language cannot replace the beauty and power of description provided by the picture. Of course, in transmitting the actual image both media suffer from certain shortcomings. The word is not a picture and - certainly - the picture is not a word either. Through experience acquired by reading and viewing these shortcomings are corrected by imagination and in this way, by a complex process of mental, emotional and visual perception, both word and picture eventually combine into an impressive whole called work of art. With its voices, smells, taste, touch of an olive tree, howl of the wind or moisture of air nature is superior to both picture and language, and any art intending to imitate it only asks for trouble.

Thus, all one can do is single out a fragment from the full and integral beauty of nature, and making this fragment inseparable from the whole is only a matter of observation, spiritual and emotional contact - and skill as well. The question whether the islanders of Pag are maybe/probably/certainly Martians is basically of minor importance and beyond the sphere of a medium like photography, but it is definitely a metaphor associated with the pictures of the four photographers who tried to "describe" on the island of Pag this wonder of nature set against the background of the whole which reaches from the local to the universal. This power of the media was noted long ago by Fox Talbot, fascinated by the mountainous Swiss landscape. The result was the invention called photography, and the proper question would therefore be "doesn’t photography maybe/probably/certainly" come from Mars?’

Today photography sustains the original fascination with which the medium "describes" nature, whose changes are inversely proportional to the capacity of the medium to "capture" the moment. Therefore, more than in any other thematic photographic genre, the photographs of nature and the resulting images retain in terms of process and outcome the charm and the memory of the first photograph. Noting the proper ratio of the static to the dynamic, of the rock to the light illuminating it, capturing the proper ratio of the tree to the wind that agitates its, observing the surface of the sea and the flickering reflection on it - all that takes much more than mere tourist "snapshooting" of landscape motifs and other observed trivialities.

Noting the value of a rocky shallow, seeing the sky instead of the ground or dry grass, observing in ultimate silence the calm of this somewhat haunted island landscape which is truly said to be from another world requires from the artist total dedication to superior forces and to the energy that drives them. These are not by any means many-coloured tourist motifs, but in their stark manifestation the individual is recognized as the universal. The Pag adventure of four photographic artists, Dražen Lapić, Andriana Škunca, Damil Kalogjera and Željko Jelenski, resulted in pictures the spiritual dimension of which surpasses the scale of mimesis and/or of naturalistic description of an insular landscape. These pictures - within the givens of the medium - do not speak about the inhabitants of Pag (they are not there), but they speak about the mystique of their habitat. Maybe that is the reason why they are not present in the pictures. The magic of the place depicted by the pictures is much older, and the question of whether they originated from Mars or reached this spot with the ancient Slavs is not really important for the picture. These are much older sediments turned - within the limits of human capacity - into pictures with the help of a medium, used to (perhaps) perceive and understand the dimensions of time and of the space settled by people who are maybe/probably/certainly Martians. Just like a word, the picture is also a form of speech, but like silence a void filled with space speaks more eloquently than noisy rhetoric and picturesque motifs. At the initiative of Dražen Lapić this truth was grasped very well by the photographers involved in the project. For completely obvious reasons they call this project "Photographic Art Monograph of the Island of Pag" It is not, perhaps, a "tourist" monograph, but tourism includes another - much more valuable - dimension which does not boil down to swimming in the sea.

Želimir Koščević