It’s incredibly difficult to describe Olga Karlovac once you look through her images. She’s not a landscape photographer, but she shoots landscapes that even the staunchest support of Adams would fall for. She’s not a street photographer, but she does street photography in a way that Diado Moriyama would commend. And Olga’s work includes portraiture that doesn’t draw influence from other visual media the same way that so many pieces on social media do. But instead, Olga’s work holistically embraces her own identity and finds comfort in her own skin like one would a silk kimono. With every turn of the page of her latest book, Elsewhere, it seems like Olga’s camera is aided by a poltergeist that provides a blessing like no other.
That’s to say that Olga’s work isn’t just otherworldly and cosmic; it’s simply imagined and brought into fruition by its creator in a way that very few of us can conjure. Perhaps most importantly, it plays with black and white in a way that we’ve only ever seen otherwise in expensive Taschen books and on handheld device screens. By that, we mean that Elsewhere plays with the idea of dark mode, light mode, and embraces the idea of the expandable spread.
Truly, Olga cannot be contained. Yet, at the same time, her photographs have a sense of authenticity that’s sorely missing in much of modern photography. I don’t believe I should contain her either, but if you took the best of several Magnum photographers and put them into one person, the work would look like Olga’s. She embraces camera shake, blur, blown-out highlights, shadows that are too deep, and all the gray spaces in between in a very masterful way.
We named Olga Karlovac as one of the most inspirational photographers of 2023, and we’ve also previously featured her work. With the Ricoh GR in hand, she photographs the world around her in a way that so many can only dream of — literally because they’re unsure of how to make art like this or would feel like they’d be jeered at by peers.
“Usually I spot something (and) feel drawn to it — it can be a person walking across the street, it can be the rooftop of an old house, the men behind the corner running away, actually anything. As I shoot a lot while walking, driving in a tram or a car, everything happens very quickly.”
Olga Karlovac, in our previous interview
Elsewhere starts with a simple forward and uses the square format to make the most of Olga’s work. Sometimes, the images are split down the middle in various ways. But Olga’s work is esoteric, and those who vibe with it will deeply feel every photograph when they page through the book at a slow pace. For that reason, I truly recommend that you take a look at it on a day off and when you’re personally feeling like you’re in a good place. With that said, Elsewhere can make the perfect morning cup of coffee or tea even better.
Several photographers shoot in black and white. But not many of them embrace the intricacies that the format allows you to get away with. Olga’s images embrace lots of photographic flaws, sometimes looking like charcoal sketches that embrace smears. It’s for this reason and her incredible work overall that we award this book five out of five stars and give it our Editor’s Choice award.
Elsewhere by Olga Karlovac can be purchased directly from Olga.