Creator Stories

Olg Karlovac

Olga Karlovac is a self-taught, abstract street photographer born in Dubrovnik, Croatia. She is best known for her unique and expressive style of photography and her trilogy of self-published photobooks.

Olga uses her camera to capture fleeting moments and emotions. Working exclusively in black and white, predominantly after dark and rainy conditions, her abstract images blur the lines between figuration and visual poetry. Her dreamlike scenes lead us down winding streets and invite us to linger and lose track of time, to recognize the familiar within the barely there.

in the blink of an eye
in the moment between day and night,
somewhere at the edge of darkness and light
walking down an empty road below the mountain of memories
while strong winds from the north carve your marks all over my skin
i feel your breath
and i imagine…

Olga originally wrote as the opening text for her 'Escape' photo book.

Her photography has been featured in many magazines, such as Black and White Photography Magazine, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Standard, and Inspired Eye.

Olga has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions around the world, mainly in London, where she has shown in Saatchi, POSK, ECAD, Project Space, and other galleries. She has also exhibited in the rest of the UK, the USA New York, Belgium, Italy, Iran, Albania, Ireland, France, The Netherlands, and others.

Olga's latest publication, titled ‘Elsewhere,’ is a self-published book more than three years since she published ‘Escape,’ the final book of the trilogy of her books (‘Before Winter’, ‘The Disarray Escape’). With a foreword written by Tracy Calder, the book is a sequel coming after the trilogy and imaginative and abstract journey, with B&W images taken in mostly rural parts of Croatia, cities including London, Požega, and Zagreb sequenced in chapters with some poetry as well.

as Tracy Calder wrote:

“Olga’s work often begins with a challenging emotion, an internal conflict or a desire for peace that cannot be expressed in words.”

Whether it’s a yearning for the past or a longing for new beginnings, her inner state is the catalyst for work that is both cathartic and exploratory. A self-taught artist, she is not bound by the ‘rules’ of photography that stifle many artists – here, water on the lens, camera movement, and light pollution are all embraced, relished even. Olga looks for a moment that reflects her inner state, and when she sees it, she opens the shutter."

See more of Olga's B&W art on her profile.