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Artist Misstatement
A reflection on misreading, mismeasuring, and misbelonging in photography.
Jelenko Dragisic
2025
I’ve practiced photography for over 35 years. The word “practiced” is important. I haven’t pursued photography professionally as a full-time occupation. I haven’t made a career of it, and I haven’t wanted to. But I have lived with it, and in it, for most of my life, sometimes quietly, sometimes obsessively, always privately. It has never been a sideline. It's simply been there, as a way of looking, thinking, perceiving and creating.
My relationship with photography has always been a slow and internal one, largely unencumbered by audience, market, or profession. I've taken commissions, entered competitions, exhibited here and there; but these were footnotes, experiments. Most of my photographic life has remained unshared, and deliberately so. The images I’ve made were not intended to impress. They were, in some sense, attempts to challenge myself, to see whether I could get closer to something I couldn’t name, but somehow felt was just out of frame. That pursuit has rarely resolved. And perhaps that is the point. I’ve long been more interested in the image that escapes me than the one that satisfies.
Over time, this pursuit has made me more selective, more reticent, more critical of my own work. A photograph that others might respond to immediately often takes me weeks, or years, to understand whether it speaks to me at all. I’ve learned to distrust the image that charms too easily. I've come to value the misfires, the near-misses, the images that won’t let me decide what they are.
There is a temptation in writing these kinds of statements to claim a position, to stake an identity: I am a photographer. I reject that. Not out of modesty, but out of precision. Photography is not something I do as a role. It’s something I engage with, something I follow, something I misread on purpose.
This misreading is essential.
As Harold Bloom wrote of poets, the creative act often requires a strong misreading of what has come before. The same can be said of photographers. But to misread strongly requires a certain independence, an independence not only from external constraints like style, genre, or profession, but from the gravitational pull of identity itself. When a person’s photographic practice is too embedded in a predefined role, whether commercial, academic, documentary, or artistic, the range for creative misreading is narrowed. One begins to speak within the boundaries of a school, a scene, a convention.
But strong misreading also depends on something more intimate: an internal creative capacity to see the world differently, and to photograph it not as it appears, but as it resists appearance. This capacity cannot be borrowed or inherited. It must be cultivated through solitude, persistence, and failure. One cannot misread without first having the courage to step outside the interpretive scaffolding offered by others.
Photographers have always done this. Not always by intention, but often by necessity. The history of photography is full of people who worked beyond schools, beyond institutions, beyond genres. People whose sensibilities were shaped by practice, not pedagogy.
We also know that exceptional technical proficiency, knowing a camera inside and out, does not necessarily result in meaningful photographs. Just as a language professor might never write a moving novel, a technician of lenses might never produce an image that lingers in the soul. This truth is not unique to photography; it is common to all creative pursuits. But in photography, it is perhaps easier to forget. Because the tool appears to do so much.
What often gets missed in the appreciation of photography is that photographs are too often judged by criteria that come from elsewhere: from painting, from film, from literature, or from technical disciplines. Photography has spent two centuries trying to prove its legitimacy by aligning itself with these other forms, trying to be measured against paradigms that do not, and cannot, speak to what photography truly is. And in doing so, both photographers and viewers have been misled.
A photograph gains validity not merely through technical execution or compositional balance, but through something much harder to name: its attitude, its intention, its unrepeatability. That is why photography must be approached through its incommensurability. It cannot be reduced to the standards of other disciplines. It must not be justified by analogy. It must be seen on its own terms, or not at all.
At the centre of it all is love. A love of the medium, and a love of the moment. A love of the way the complex world can suddenly become legible through a lens, and equally, how that legibility can collapse into mystery just as quickly. I am drawn to the photograph that resists being reduced to a message or a meaning. I want images that do not resolve easily. Images that don’t explain themselves. Images that remain open, as I try to remain open to them.
If this is a statement, it is also a misstatement. A refusal to clarify too much. A way of keeping the photograph unfinished, as it should be.
A reflection on misreading, mismeasuring, and misbelonging in photography.
Jelenko Dragisic
2025
I’ve practiced photography for over 35 years. The word “practiced” is important. I haven’t pursued photography professionally as a full-time occupation. I haven’t made a career of it, and I haven’t wanted to. But I have lived with it, and in it, for most of my life, sometimes quietly, sometimes obsessively, always privately. It has never been a sideline. It's simply been there, as a way of looking, thinking, perceiving and creating.
My relationship with photography has always been a slow and internal one, largely unencumbered by audience, market, or profession. I've taken commissions, entered competitions, exhibited here and there; but these were footnotes, experiments. Most of my photographic life has remained unshared, and deliberately so. The images I’ve made were not intended to impress. They were, in some sense, attempts to challenge myself, to see whether I could get closer to something I couldn’t name, but somehow felt was just out of frame. That pursuit has rarely resolved. And perhaps that is the point. I’ve long been more interested in the image that escapes me than the one that satisfies.
Over time, this pursuit has made me more selective, more reticent, more critical of my own work. A photograph that others might respond to immediately often takes me weeks, or years, to understand whether it speaks to me at all. I’ve learned to distrust the image that charms too easily. I've come to value the misfires, the near-misses, the images that won’t let me decide what they are.
There is a temptation in writing these kinds of statements to claim a position, to stake an identity: I am a photographer. I reject that. Not out of modesty, but out of precision. Photography is not something I do as a role. It’s something I engage with, something I follow, something I misread on purpose.
This misreading is essential.
As Harold Bloom wrote of poets, the creative act often requires a strong misreading of what has come before. The same can be said of photographers. But to misread strongly requires a certain independence, an independence not only from external constraints like style, genre, or profession, but from the gravitational pull of identity itself. When a person’s photographic practice is too embedded in a predefined role, whether commercial, academic, documentary, or artistic, the range for creative misreading is narrowed. One begins to speak within the boundaries of a school, a scene, a convention.
But strong misreading also depends on something more intimate: an internal creative capacity to see the world differently, and to photograph it not as it appears, but as it resists appearance. This capacity cannot be borrowed or inherited. It must be cultivated through solitude, persistence, and failure. One cannot misread without first having the courage to step outside the interpretive scaffolding offered by others.
Photographers have always done this. Not always by intention, but often by necessity. The history of photography is full of people who worked beyond schools, beyond institutions, beyond genres. People whose sensibilities were shaped by practice, not pedagogy.
We also know that exceptional technical proficiency, knowing a camera inside and out, does not necessarily result in meaningful photographs. Just as a language professor might never write a moving novel, a technician of lenses might never produce an image that lingers in the soul. This truth is not unique to photography; it is common to all creative pursuits. But in photography, it is perhaps easier to forget. Because the tool appears to do so much.
What often gets missed in the appreciation of photography is that photographs are too often judged by criteria that come from elsewhere: from painting, from film, from literature, or from technical disciplines. Photography has spent two centuries trying to prove its legitimacy by aligning itself with these other forms, trying to be measured against paradigms that do not, and cannot, speak to what photography truly is. And in doing so, both photographers and viewers have been misled.
A photograph gains validity not merely through technical execution or compositional balance, but through something much harder to name: its attitude, its intention, its unrepeatability. That is why photography must be approached through its incommensurability. It cannot be reduced to the standards of other disciplines. It must not be justified by analogy. It must be seen on its own terms, or not at all.
At the centre of it all is love. A love of the medium, and a love of the moment. A love of the way the complex world can suddenly become legible through a lens, and equally, how that legibility can collapse into mystery just as quickly. I am drawn to the photograph that resists being reduced to a message or a meaning. I want images that do not resolve easily. Images that don’t explain themselves. Images that remain open, as I try to remain open to them.
If this is a statement, it is also a misstatement. A refusal to clarify too much. A way of keeping the photograph unfinished, as it should be.