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17 March - 2 May - Museum of Modern Art - In this exhibition we show a selection of photographs from two segments of the rich oeuvre of Tošo Dabac – Zagreb in the thirties (cycles People in the street, Another view), and Dubrovnik over the span of time from the 1930s to the 1960s (26 photographs exhibited for the first time)...

The cycle People in the Street, bears a particular gravity and places Tošo Dabac for sure among the most powerful world social documentary creators. With a great deal of compassion and a critical social awareness, he documented scenes of wretchedness, exclusion, loneliness, lethargy and hopelessness, among both city dwellers and those lost souls who had come in from the country.

But he was also open to less troubling sides of city life. He registered the colourful bustle of the streets, the holiday-time city promenades, moments for strolling at leisure, relaxation at excursion time. He was particularly sensitive to the visual dimensional values of the street scene, to the textures of the tramlines, the street paving flags, the banking, verticals of the lamps, spokes of car wheels, the ribs of shop window blinds, the rhythms of steps and the shades of their handrails. He recorded the luxuriance of the scatter of light from jets of water in the watering pipes in the park, and the dull gleam of wet umbrellas and their diffuse shadows on the paving in varying intensities of grey; then came scenes of the city in the fog with finely gradated degrees of differentiation of both form and tone, then snow scenes, as muted as those in the fog.

He loved bird’s eye view angles, a view onto a crossroad, a street with cars and pedestrians that cast long shadows, rich and intricate, which annulled something of the distinction between solid and ethereal, real and unreal; there is also metaphysical poetry here, recollections of De Chirico, but sometimes these combined blotches of things, figures and shadows are reduced to some early adumbrations of Tachisme. In fact, in a magnificent manner, Dabac endorses what is basic to photography, what is immanent to it, and that is light. In all its manifestations and shades too; fitting to the motif of the moment.

In photographs of Dubrovnik too Dabac used the solar vividness of the place as a generator for his virtuoso operations with light. Quite often, in his familiar manner, he makes use of the spectacle of the low morning sun that throws long shadows of people and things on the ground, lively arabesques in the composition of the picture. No single figure with its pertaining shadow is beside the point, without meaning or role in the structure of the composition and the atmosphere of the picture at the same time, in the rounding of its contents: this might be a lively group of women below the arches at the Rupe Museum, bathers on the stone of the waterfront, or travellers on the quay of the old city port. And the washing on the lines stretched out among the houses in the old city centre only reveals its zigzag spatial constellation by a shadow on the stone street.
And of course, along with the other city images, the boys fishing on the bank, the scene from Stradun in the morning, the figure of a Franciscan in the cloister of the priory, the city marketplace from bird’s eye view, there is also the legendary tram, whose rhythm of windows and divisions rhymes with the facade of the Hotel Imperial in the background.

The cities have been reduced to the common denominator of the view of the great photographer Tošo Dabac that will be a catalyst for our vision too. Apart from our being able to meet scenes and an atmosphere that time has modified, Dabac’s viewpoint will enrich us with the discovery of the substances hidden within familiar images.