Like no other photographer, Abadžić seems reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s “subjective time”, of the understanding of photography not as a copy of reality but a shaped history of the real.

What makes Stanko Abadžić’s photography special or different?

Its distinctiveness, if the answer is a single sentence, lies in the negative of the first impression. That first impression of aestheticism and documentary quality is in fact nostalgia and the de-framing of reality. For that matter, Abadžić himself has testified to that hypothesis in one of his diary notes: “I simply cannot easily accept that ambiences which were making people happy for years are disappearing.”