Traditional collective photography exhibition
14th Rovinj Photography Festival 2025
The competition was attended by regular members of the CVU Batana Rovinj and citizens of the city of Rovinj-Rovigno, as well as external members.
Opening: Wednesday, March 26, 2025 at 7:00 PM, PAG Batana Gallery, Trg brodogradilišta 2.
A total of 148 photographs from 39 authors (in 13 collections) were submitted to the 14th Rovinj Photography Festival, and the selectors selected 70 photographs from 39 authors and seven collections. The theme was "free" The Rovinj Photography Festival is always interesting for the jury, because each time you can see the diversity of the authors' approach to the world around us, when it comes to the chosen moment through that "click" on the camera, which either did not freeze in eternity the moment we wanted to capture... or we did not. It sounds a bit poetic and philosophical, photography is like that (or should be like that) where a lot of the unsaid and inexplicable - except perhaps for the bards of poetry, is reduced to that last moment when we decided on an action, perhaps a completely empty and physical one... click and... we move on. "Only poets know what they wanted to say", but what we read may not have anything to do with that, but is the creation of a new story that was created in the eye of the beholder - that is why too much explanation in poetry and photography is not needed. This selection did not take too much time to choose the works for the exhibition, because the better works stood out by their quality. First place went to the collection "Disappearance" by Erman Bančić, whose four photographs testify to the effect of the transience of time through the use of long exposure, as well as the transience of ourselves. In the photographs, only the stone pier is stable and permanent, and everything around it is constantly changing, becoming and disappearing. Second place went to a completely different collection of photographs, "The Star That Fell to the City and Hiding in the Shop Window" by Kruna Sudec, which seems to be a visual illustration for the introduction to a story that the Taviani brothers would turn into a film. Third place went to the collection "Storm in a Bottle" by Patrizia Sfettina Jurman, which as a visual experiment may be simple in idea (such are usually the best), but is very impressive as a photographic work... as if it is visually intoxicating while looking at this series of photographs. In addition to these three series of photographs, which won the first three places, nine other authors were praised for their photographs, including: Zoran Ljubičić for: Waiting and Soot, Emil Pucić for: Solo and Sparks, Silvia Butković for Surrounded by Geometry, Duet and Alone, Anton Meden for: Flight, Mladen Boljkovac for the collection: Photographers Shoot, Filip Babajko for: Ice, Robert Hrelja for: Foggy Wave and Piazza Grande, Dino Šprem for: From Barcelona with Love, Željka Čižić for: Hands - all excellent photographs of different motifs, styles and atmospheres that are all visually impressive, from an excellent concert "rock" photograph, a mystical railway platform, a photographer caught in "action", a mystical old town in the fog, a kiss caught on the street, a statue calling on the sun, to name a few... The same applies to the other photographs in this review, which fortunately avoided the trend of "improving" photography with the help of increasingly widespread AI. Photography is very much alive in Rovinj this year as this festival demonstrates with these original works... there is no fear for photography in Rovinj.
