BIOGRAPHY

Pavo Urban was born in Dubrovnik on August 1, 1968. After attending secondary nautical school, he enrolled in the Marine Faculty in Dubrovnik. He sailed for a short time in the fleet of the shipping company Jadrolinija. Self-taught, he got into photography in a secondary school, and later became a member of the Marin Getaldić Photo Club in Dubrovnik.

In September 1991 he enrolled in the academy of Dramatic art in Zagreb, film and TV camera major, but did not start studying because he decided to stay in Dubrovnik, now at war. On September 29. 1991. he was on the front line in Župa Dubrovačka. It was here that he began his wartime



Female nude in interior (Provocation)
1989.

THE MOTIF
OF DOOR
IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS
OF PAVO URBAN


Whether we are dealing with scenes from indoors or out, arrangements or documentary shots, the pre-war photographs of Pavo Urban are characterized by a highly marked propensity for the symbolic, the mystical and even the religious. Along with portraits, figures and nudes that, abetted by the penumbra of an interior or an effect of emphatic chiaroscuro, regularly show elation, contemplation, a suggestion of contacts with the other-worldly, we also find an appropriate repertoire of musical instruments, crosses, veils and mirrors.


The allegorical vehicles of such scenes are mostly unclothed female forms, sometimes with the associated figure of the author himself, in especially staged and directed scenes. In the narrative arrangements of a mystical and symbolic charge, the stage set is evoked, or painting of some Mannerist or Baroque characteristics. The fact that Pavo also worked as a theatre documentarist is perhaps additional explanation of such proclivities, but one should also not neglect the local Dubrovnik steeping in the emotion-laden mythology of the historical heritage that contemporary creators here find it so hard to evade.

Shadows (Dubrovnik) 1990.


Blessing of the port (Dubrovnik) 1990.

In conjunction with the mainly female figure/nude, the model for which, at the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s, was mostly his girlfriend Mara Bratos (today an accomplished photographer in her own right), in the whole of the system of iconography there is one connecting and subsuming element-the leitmotif of the door. Whether this is a deliberate and conscious symbol, or, which is more likely, a subconscious fixation, the fact is that there are a large amount of photographs in which a door (gate) appears as a distinct part of the scene, a prominent topos. A door in the foreground or mid-ground, or even repeated in the perspective of the frame. Bedroom door, corridor, city gate, even the gate in which a year later he was to be killed - the Ploce Gate (Blessing of the Gate, 1990).

This gate is a site in which a scene of one of his masterpieces takes place, a scene of three men and a dog on some steps, in the niche of the entrance to a store (located under the arch of the same city gate just mentioned) serving as shelter from shells. This is a photograph in which the actors of the event give off a powerful emotional amalgam, combined fear, contempt, resignation, mild altruism... As symbol, it is well known, a door is a place of transition between two worlds, the known and the unknown, darkness and light... It means not only passage, but also a call to a passage between two domains. Summons to a journey, to transcendence, to a move from the profane to the sacred.


Female figure in interior (Intimacy) 1990.


Man with the Dog (Fear) 1991.


If we add to these meanings that of the central motif of the bare body that, apart from one pole of meaning (material, sensual, erotic) also symbolizes the idea of return to the state of origin, that total suffusion into and harmonious relationship with nature and the divine, of the attainment of a renewed state of innocence, freedom from feelings of shame, as in the time before original sin - and in Urban's depictions of the nude we can read precisely such tendencies - it will not perhaps be an exaggeration to claim that this young man possessed a special intuition that, choosing its symbols, did not only indicate elevated inclinations but in a particular way was an annunciated his forthcoming destiny - untimely departure from this world, transition from the world of the profane to the domain of the sacred.

Antun Maračić