a walk with Jelena Stanković
We levitated with Jelena Stanković through the streets of Leiria, a city she's visiting for the third time as part of her participation in the sixth Fotografar Palavras exhibition—a project that brings together photographers and writers around multiple image interpretations, and in which she participates with great enthusiasm. Her white All Star sneakers, accustomed to walking Serbian streets, are already familiar with some of the sidewalks in the historic center of this Portuguese city, especially the more run-down and less crowded ones: "Leiria is a close and very inspiring place," she states calmly and assertively.
With a degree in Classical Literature, she works in a bookstore. In fact, words have always inhabited the left side of her chest, so pen and paper have been with her since she was nine. She feels this is her way of finding herself and above all, of connecting with her inner world. A world that closes itself off during the darkest periods of her life, inevitably closing itself off to the art of writing.
It was one of those moments of separation from words that, out of a need to artistically express her creativity, led her to writing through light. Photography then emerged as an escape, a new door that opened and over time, Jelena Stanković became inseparable from her camera.
She remembers it all starting with her fascination with observing the colors of reflections in water, which led her to the artistic movement she loves most: Impressionism. At the time, still without a camera, she captured her first reflection with her cell phone (an image she shared with Ope Magazine during our tour) and from that moment on, she began to "see the world with eyes open to the small things," and then adds, "But what are the small things?"
This awakening to the reflectivity of water later made her more attentive to other types of reflections: "In the reflections of windows, many things happen, many realities are reflected, many elements interact, and somehow, everything is connected. Many moments meet in a single window." She confesses that it is only later, during the photo editing process, that many of these elements are revealed; at the moment she takes the photograph, there is only her connection to the moment and the image she can see.
Our conversation quickly returns to words, her childhood, and her father's bookshelves filled with books. She feels life through words, and this is what led her to defy her parents' wishes, who wanted her to study medicine. "When I write, I also create images in my imagination, so the image has always been there. And with the camera, you can also capture creative scenarios in life. You can use your vision to tell reality." Therefore, she doesn't intend to portray reality per se, but to create her own multiple interpretations of reality: "We live in a system of imagery repetition, and when we see the same thing over and over, we enter memorization mode. We see the world through drowsy eyes. We live in a system of reality, but I want to show that change is possible." In her opinion, we need to wake up, think about what we don't see, and seek the "deep side of reality."
Jelena Stanković spent much of her life in Belgrade, where, at the age of fourteen, she had to live alone in order to continue her studies. She also recalls when, at sixteen, her parents sent her to her grandparents house to escape the war. There, war was a distant, almost unreal vision, reaching her only through the news. She speaks of the sound of sirens, bombs, shattering glass, and her windowless house. She speaks of the spirit of unity and courage experienced in those days when, after an attack on a civilian transport convoy, she and everyone around her took to the streets with targets drawn on scrap paper with the caption "We all are targets." She remembers this time as something distant. Perhaps that's why she appreciates small moments in time and prefers to live in the present, not getting caught up in dates or numbers.
She states that she only feels complete when connected with creative energy, and this brings us to her travels to outside Serbia in which,, in addition of bonding to the local, she has made several photographer friends from whom she says she learned to be invisible: “in some places, you need to be silent, wait, and offer smiles." From her experience, it is in this invisibility, in accepting without judgment, in this neutral energy, that one can capture reality as it is.
Just as a butterfly feeds from flower to flower, her creativity now flows into two complementary forms of expression. Therefore, we return to her relationship with words, to the time when, as a student, she wrote for a newspaper and had the opportunity to interview artists, something she never imagined was possible. She again draws the parallel between her relationship with the two arts: "Writing shows us the immaterial reality, while photography brings us the visible reality: words explain, photography shows."
A few steps further, she tells us about her diary, which initially included only genuine emotions, but which, over time, also included fiction and poetry; revealing her greatest literary inspirations: "Those who read Dostoevsky never remain the same person; he respects inner reality, and Virginia Woolf resonates with me in sensitivity." She likes to include poetry in her sentences and express her feelings in beautiful words, which is why her "sentences aren't very long either." She now admits that if she photographed her diary, her photographs would be much simpler than those she uses to express the complexity of the relationships she seeks to capture on the streets she walks.
We then return to the reason that brought her to Portugal, Leiria, and she shyly shares that in the Fotografar Palavras project, she enjoys the role of photographer more than that of writer: "My poetry is a home, but for now, in this context, it's still just an open window. Our mind is a religious love."
For Jelena Stanković, poetry and photography have something hermetic in them. Therefore, photographed reflections are also a form of poetry for her, and it is in them that she finds herself.