About This Project

Nikola Olic

The unstaged photography of Nikola Olić seeks poetry and portraiture in architecture, seen as sculptural studies of the modern everyday, intimate portraits of contemporary monuments and to paraphrase Modest Mussorgsky, facades as pictures at an exhibition. Expanding on the grammar of architectural photography, architecture’s infinite visual possibilities and mixed and complex intents are examined, celebrated and liberated through diverse subjects that can be ambiguous, disorienting, transitive, morphed, obstructed, partial or even absent, and agnostic of commercial or marketplace interests. This in turn provides a sustained gaze at the unintended, unclaimed and uninhabited visual worlds that are hidden in plain sight, with a variety of different architectural conclusions, truths and final states. With photography, we can domesticate these immutable structures, reimagine their certainty and permanence with a delightful ambiguity, and meditate on the thin line between the familiar and unfamiliar. That thin line between the familiar and unfamiliar is most potent and satisfying when examined within our collective public experience of architecture, the shared visual language that architecture is, with its local and global memory and recognizability, and the fluid scope of baselines and outliers for how architecture can be photographed. Nikola Olić (b. 1974, Yugoslavia) is a Serbian-American photographer based in Dallas, Texas. His photographs have been published internationally and were most recently exclusively used to launch the New York Times Architectural Quiz series. He is among 30 photographers included in the UK’s 2023 Aesthetica Art Prize.

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