Bird over Hum

The interestingly titled photo exhibition Ptica nad Humom by Ivan Kelava will open on Saturday, May 10, at 12 noon at the Ivo Andrić Book Club, as part of the art program of Mostar Spring 2025 – XXVII Days of Matica Hrvatska Mostar.

– In a finally realized collaboration with the Ivo Andrić Book Lovers Club in Mostar, we are pleased to organize an exhibition of photographs Birds over Hum by the renowned Mostar photographer Ivan Kelava, created using a drone, which offers us unique views of the values and beauty of our Hum homeland, our water and cultural treasures, unique localities and precious natural scenes that make us love everything.
We are Herzegovina.

The bird's eye perspective is metaphorical, but it is probably quite appropriate to what the bird's eye actually sees, but flies over and does not note. The human eye, especially a good photographer's, needs an intermediary for that exceptional privilege of seeing from the sky. Therefore, the drone has proven to be an extraordinary helper for photographers who thus become intermediaries for the eye of the observer, the one who can see the photographer's effect.

Kelava successfully selects not only the subjects of the photo but also their angles, although this is much easier from the ground. This adds to the attractiveness and spectacularity of the scenes below or past which we pass by without seeing their irresistibility and uniqueness. From completely new angles, many of the scenes exhibited look as if we have never seen them before, with which Kelava opens a photographic book of new perspectives on them.
What can we notice in these photographs or learn from them?

It seems to me that the artist's most visible tendency towards escapism is also a suggestion to people to experience the same. Because everything the artist shows us is right there next to us, but we don't have these escapist urges and we are clearly fine in our cramped and urban captivity. I guess that's why these natural scenes depicted
treasures, old cities surrounded by ramparts and all the photographed scenes and objects, rivers, bridges and old cities, precious values that live their lives for us, unconnected to us humans, completely devoid of human presence. I don't know if that's worse or better! People have their reasons, and birds have theirs – wrote, among other things, in the exhibition catalogue, its editor Dragan Marijanović.

A WORD OR TWO ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ivan Kelava is a photographer, lecturer and, above all, a person who enjoys photography. He was born in 1981 in Sarajevo. He graduated and received his master's degree from the Faculty of Economics, University of Mostar. He has been involved in photography for 20 years, has won multiple awards and is the author of four solo exhibitions and a participant in several group exhibitions. His most famous work is a photograph of Grandfather Pavo, which is in the collection of the Zagreb Museum of Arts and Crafts, and was also published in the British magazine Practical Photography Magazine in the field of portrait photography. He also leads photography courses, including humanitarian ones. He is an active member of the Mostar Photo Club. He lives and works in Mostar, is married and has one child.