There is an intriguing quote at the beginning of Olga Karlovac’s new book, titled “elsewhere.” In a foreword written by editor and photographer Tracy Calder, she writes of Karlovac’s work,

It’s not street photography (in the traditional sense), it’s not portraiture and it’s not landscape. It has elements of all three, and yet it morphs and mutates depending on what you need from it.

Look at that last phrase: “…depending on what you need from it.” This is exactly the power and allure of the images in “elsewhere.” The book is a collection of suggestions, hints, and promises of something just beyond, just elsewhere. We are always just about to reach—something.  A truth, perhaps.  Perhaps an understanding.

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“elsewhere” by Olga Karlovac
Self-published, 2024
review by W. Scott Olsen

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Later in the foreword, Calder writes,

Looking at her oeuvre, it’s clear that Olga is fond of experimentation, but that’s not to say her studies of streets, landscapes, trees and people lack consistency. In fact, quite the opposite. There are subjects and themes that she returns to over and over: the lone figure on the street, the self-portrait, empty buildings and rain-soaked roads. Olga delights in capturing liminal states: the moment when day turns to night, the point where city-dwellers lose their individuality and become detail-less shapes and forms, the zone between sleep and wakefulness. Nothing is static. In fact, Olga herself is constantly moving, either walking the streets or observing the world from a car or a tram.

elsewhere is a deeply satisfying collection of images. Karlovac’s work is blurry, out of focus, oftentimes grainy. They sit on the edge of representation, and yet, finally, representation has very little to do with what they are about. We see enough of the real world to feel like we know where we are. Yes, that’s a house. Yes, that’s a tree. Yes, that’s a street. But the subject of these photographs is a mood. And if I tell you it’s a dark mood, I don’t mean depressed. I don’t mean harmful. What I mean by dark is mysterious and attractive, the way twilight is as much a beginning of something very interesting as it is the end of something clear.

The book begins with a Prologue, a self-portrait headshot, both clear and blurry, a double exposure, full of grain. And there is a short bit of text by Karlovac herself which says,

as i write this i long for new beginnings,
i crave for illusions of a reality that never truly existed
like driving along…
echoes turning into bursts of dust
shining underneath the shades of a pale moon…

This poetic sentiment pervades elsewhere. The images are very much the kind of things you almost see out of a corner of an eye, out of a memory. In that way, they insist. I don’t mean they insist on anything else. They simply insist. They will not go away. The image hovers in your mind, not so much asking to be explained as to be experienced.

elsewhere is divided into smaller sections. There is a Prologue, a section called “the hill” (“…and anything and everything hides the reasons why…”), a section called “under the vanishing star,” and a section called “the other side of rainy glass,” which is perhaps the best description of what looking at Karlovac’s work reminds me of, and there is a section called “ashes” as well. The sections are not so much groupings of locations or subjects as groupings of moods.

In terms of Book Arts, elsewhere, which is self-published, is elegant and classy. Some of the pages have black borders. Some have white borders. Sometimes, the images are contained on a page. Sometimes, they leap the gutter to fill 1/3 of the facing page. Every now and then, the book reveals an unfolding spread. The result of the changing borders and image placement is to feel that the book itself has a kind of story to tell. Not so much that there is a narrative arc of rising action to some kind of climax, but that the group has integrity, that somehow there is a whole here.

What this book is finally about is a state of mind and a state of emotion. I go back to that opening quote: this is a book about what you need from it. And I would imagine different people coming to this book will have substantially different stories to tell.

For myself, I love difficult weather. I love the mysterious, both in mood and situation. I love not quite being able to do whatever because in that not-quite-ness, there is both promise and a question. As a matter of fact, it might be appropriate to say this book is a collection of visual and emotional questions. It is not the answer she’s after. But a state of wondering. An appreciation of being on the road to elsewhere.

A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.