The exhibition offers a new perspective on the work of Pavo Urban, the Dubrovnik photographer best known for his poignant images documenting the destruction of the city in December 1991, and especially for the final photographs he took on 6 December 1991 during the fiercest attack on Dubrovnik, when the young twenty-three-year-old photographer lost his life. This is the exhibition's third presentation, following Zagreb and Pula, with its Dubrovnik showing carrying particular emotional significance.

The exhibition's author and curator, Mate Marić, emphasizes that the exhibition presents Urban as a Mediterranean photographer. The focus is on photographs taken between 1985 and 1991, before he became a war photojournalist. These images depict scenes from his everyday life: people, faces, stone, light, the sea, and streets. It is the life Urban lived and knew from within. We also encounter "baba" Nika and "nona" Tea. In their gestures, presence, and gaze, something profound and archetypically Mediterranean emerges.

The "Mediterranean" is recognized in small, recurring details: in the rhythm of daily life, in the relationship to space and people, in the way one sits, converses, or remains silent. It is the Mediterranean described by Predrag Matvejević and Vladimir Nazor—complex, contradictory, yet unmistakable. The Mediterranean is not a nation but a civilizational matrix, a millennia-old sediment of cultures. It speaks many languages. Pavo Urban spoke some of them.

The exhibition at the Dulčić Masle Pulitika Gallery will feature 15 photographs taken in Urban's immediate surroundings, in Dubrovnik and its environs, while also including several photographs created outside the Dubrovnik region. All works originate from the Pavo Urban Study Collection, which comprises approximately 9,500 negatives created from the very beginning of his photographic practice to his final images documenting the wartime suffering of Dubrovnik. The collection was donated to the Museum of Arts and Crafts.

Each exhibited photograph will be accompanied by a quotation from renowned Mediterranean authors—from Mahmoud Darwish and Marin Držić to Puccini and Drago Gervais.

The exhibition curator for the Dubrovnik Art Gallery is Dora Lučić.

The exhibition of photographs by Pavo Urban, a cult figure in Croatian photography and one of the symbols of wartime Dubrovnik, will remain open until 19 July 2026.

Biography

Pavo Urban was born in Dubrovnik in 1968. He began practicing photography independently while still in high school. He was a member of the Marin Getaldić Photo Club and, in 1991, worked as the official photographer of the Marin Držić Theatre and the Dubrovnik Summer Festival. That same year, he documented the destruction of the city as a war reporter. He was killed on 6 December 1991, at the age of 23, while photographing the attack on Dubrovnik. His works are preserved in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb and the Dubrovnik Art Gallery.