About

I was born in Yugoslavia, in what is now Bosnia. My family left during the war in the early nineties and started over in Sweden. We carried almost nothing with us, least of all photographs. For years I thought little of that missing box of pictures. Now I think it is the reason I do this at all.

A camera reached me a few years after we arrived, and it turned out to be the language I had been looking for. I grew up holding things in, unsure where to put what I felt; photography gave it somewhere to go. It still works that way.

The way I have come to understand it, a photograph is a kind of bookmark. You press the shutter and something abstract is held in place: a mood, a charge in the air, a feeling you could not name. Come back to the same image years later and you often find something in it you did not see at the time; it has quietly taken on another meaning. It works the way music does: made in one state, still speaking to you in every state after.

What moves me most is that we each look at the world differently, and yet an emotion in a picture can be completely universal. You can read a whole history in a face: love, exhaustion, defiance, energy. You recognise it without ever having lived that life. Photographs are bookmarks of our chapters, and I find that quietly beautiful.

I have lived in a few countries. Sweden raised me; for a stretch I lived in Peru, which changed how I see more than I expected; Amsterdam is my home now. I have stopped trying to belong to one place. I think of myself as multicultural in the plain sense. I move easily between people, and I notice that most of us have more in common than we would guess.

Twenty years in, the instinct has not changed, only the range. I have worked with artists and performers, with companies and their teams, and with people who had never stood in front of a lens before: editorial, commercial, corporate, and a long line of portraits of every age. Different rooms, the same approach: build trust quickly, keep it calm, and let the picture come from the connection rather than the pose.

I photograph wherever the work is, regularly across the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Serbia and Peru. If any of this resonates, I would love to hear from you.

You will find more of the work, and what I am photographing now, on Instagram.

I have never quite belonged to one country. But I belong completely in the few minutes it takes to make a portrait, when someone lets their guard down and, for a moment, we are simply two people in a room. In a way, I am still replacing that lost box of family photographs, one face at a time: proof that someone was here, that they were seen, that the moment was worth keeping.

We see the world differently. We feel it, it turns out, almost the same.