Serbian Beauty 12

I’ve met Jonathan shortly after his arrival in Belgrade. During my second year in the city as an art and literature student I visited a lecture by an English poet who had just started teaching at the Faculty. He talked about Byron’s “Don Juan” in a nearby restaurant with a garden. All the students present at his talk were girls.

Over the latter years of my stay in Belgrade Jonathan had always been around. We hardly ever planned to meet – he just used to appear at the same places as me, guessing where I could be. The fact that we were born on the same day several decades apart may have brought us so close to each other. At one point I got married and left Serbia.

After so many years Jonathan continues living in Belgrade, although he hasn’t made up his mind yet if he wants to stay there. Two years ago I was flicking through art magazines in a bookstore in Berlin and came across a French journal to which Jonathan regularly contributes essays. His column is entitled “Letters from Belgrade”. Accordingly, his articles are very subjectively and vividly written, with anecdotes depicting his encounters in Belgrade, but without an exception, very critical of the present state of affairs in Serbia. The article which I was scanning was not different in this respect, yet one thing caught my attention. Whatever he was criticising, Jonathan was always taking a chance to praise various, mostly young women, calling them the embodiment of Serbia’s future.

The article has made me rather nostalgic about Belgrade and, for the first time I was able to sympathise with Jonathan’s position of being a guest in a foreign country. I’ve never photographed him during the years of our friendship in Belgrade. Yet at this point I made a decision to make him my guide through Belgrade. He chose among his friends those women who in his view best embody the positive spirit of the place and I photographed them together on locations he connects with the respective models. The images have been made during my repeated short visits to Belgrade in a snapshot manner in order to capture the fleeting quality of our acquaintances. By photographing them I’m also reclaiming my memory of the years I had spent living in Belgrade.