Socialism in and out of Time in the Photographic Culture of Zagreb

In 1979, the Zagreb-based photojournalist Pavao Cajzak captured an image he titled Sheep by the Sava River. The photograph shows hundreds of sheep grazing beside the river that cuts through the southern part of Croatia’s capital city. The impression of a quintessentially bucolic scene is disrupted by the towering appearance of several socialist-era housing blocks occupying the upper half of the image. Cajzak’s photo impeccably figures socialist Yugoslavia’s disjunctive state of development, caught between the necessity to rapidly modernize and industrialize the fledgling federation, and the reality of Yugoslavia’s status as a still largely rural and underdeveloped nation. The image is just one example of socialist Zagreb’s robust photographic culture, which most often turned to the city itself as a subject, focusing on buildings, streets, trams, etc. and often revealing the ways in which Zagreb (as Croatia, Yugoslavia, and European socialism more broadly) were in and out of time, occupying multiple temporalities, progressing and stagnating. This paper seeks to understand the role of urban photography in Zagreb, and by extension Yugoslavia, a country that, unlike elsewhere in socialist Europe, did not often practice censorship or impose an official style, allowing for relative freedom of expression and, ultimately, a critical lens in all arts. I write through a variety of images from photojournalists such as Cajzak, photo-amateurs, and conceptual artists that similarly demonstrate Yugoslavia’s temporal and developmental fracture. Photography, too, is associated with multiple temporalities and thus was ideally positioned as a tool to capture Zagreb’s ambivalent public sphere.