
Her Own
- Publisher
- Self Published
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 9781838038564
- Specifications
- Flexicover
First Edition of 670 copies
128 pages
Her Own is the latest body of work by the Dublin-based photographer Dragana Jurišić, born in Slavonski Brod, Croatia (then Yugoslavia). The book is the first chapter of an ongoing series of five works due to culminate in a fictionalised biography of her aunt Gordana—a glamorous figure who left rural Yugoslavia in the nineteen-fifties and whose subsequent life involved false identities, espionage and a mystery the family was never quite able to solve. Combining photography with text, appropriated imagery, video stills, performance documentation and a series of illustrated notebooks that recall W.G. Sebald's approach to memoir, history and reflection, Jurišić traces Gordana's story through the surviving documents and the gaps between them. The work emerges from her long preoccupation with how photography can serve as a means of ordering a world in chaos—Jurišić's first photographs were made after her own home and family albums were burned during the Croatian War of Independence—and with how stories about women in the twentieth century shape what is, and is not, allowed to be said about a life.