Bio
"I was a stranger in my chosen home and realized that I was carrying something with me all these years, something from the past that was greater than the present. I wanted to find out what I had recorded of my history. I think this a very universal longing for those displaced by conflict."
Miro Kuzmanovic is a self-taught documentary Photographer raised in former Yugoslavia. He took his first photographs at the age of sixteen. The escalation of civil war and avoided being drafted into military service forced him to immigrate to Austria.
After working as a photojournalist for serval years, he returned to his homeland, where he devoted his entire work interest in issues reflecting personal experience as questions of identity, migration, memory, and history. His work is strongly influenced by his upbringing, the history of his youth, his migration, and his present culture. Overall at the center of his photographic practice is memory and how it shapes our sense of identity and reality.
In 2008 when one of the key figures of conflict wanted war crimes, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, was arrested in Serbia. That's when he found the strong need to reflect and started systematically studying the complex history of the conflict.
Over the last ten years, he extensively created a multi-layered body of work that resulted in his first photo-book, "Signs by the Roadside." It will be published this year and has been shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award.
His next long-term project explores Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croatians' self-image across the diaspora, creating their own post-war identity twenty-five years after the war. It is a sequel to "Signs by the Roadside. "
Part of his works are in the permanent collection of the vorarlberg museum and of several private collections.
CURRICULUM VITAE
Please contact for full CV.
AWARDS
OpenWalls Arles 2021
AI-AP | 37 American Illustration - American Photography Award
MACK First book award 2020
MedPhoto Award 2019
AI-AP | 36 American Illustration - American Photography Award
AI-AP | 34 American Illustration - American Photography Award
Gazebook 3rd edition winner of the exhibition prize
Prix de la Photographie
Objektiv Pressefotopreis
PUBLICATIONS
The Calvert Journal
British Journal of Phtography
Kultur - Zeitschrift für Kultur und Gesellschaft
falter.at