Svetlana Jovanovic

I was born in 1970 in Belgrade, Serbia, and have been living in the Netherlands since 1999. I graduated with a degree in Psychology from the Belgrade University and studied Photography at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, The Netherlands.

My recent photographs portrait women with strong individualities and emphasized aesthetic characteristics that are in contrast with the simplicity of the setting in which I place them, which gives them a two-dimensional dream-like surreal quality. The use of mainly three colors - white, red and black, further heightens the visual contrast in the image itself, which also stresses the contrast in the way the subjects are apperceived. My models look at the same time vulnerable and powerful, cold and seductive, sad and arrogant, lonely and self-sufficient, superficial and deep. In my work I explore certain narcissism, an attempt to forsake isolationism and explore sexuality through exhibitionism and objectification. The photographs uphold a significantly different ideal of beauty, informed by excess and kitsch, promoting the tendencies towards the conspicuous, overly sentimental and also, decadent.