Croatian Journalists Mourn Veteran Photographer Hrvoje Polan

"Suddenly, at the age of 48, the photojournalist Hrvoje Polan has left us. For nearly three decades, Hrvoje has been dealing with news and documentary photography," the Croatian Journalists' Association announced on Monday.

Polan worked for numerous newspapers and agencies, from satirical Croatian weekly magazine Feral Tribune to Reuters, before going freelance.

His photographs of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, but also from Albania, Iraq and the Palestinian Territories were published by many of the world's leading media, including the International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, Newsweek and Time.

One of his images was included in a collection of the '100 Best Pictures of the Decade 1990-2000', which was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

His last project was a book entitled 'Behind the Seven Camps: From Crimes of Culture to Culture of Crime', about the use of cultural buildings as wartime detention and killing sites.

Polan photographed 24 locations where prisoners were detained in the early 1990s.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, he took pictures at Houses of Culture in Trnopolje, Pilica and Vitez, at the Music School in Zenica and the Museum of the Battle for the Wounded on the Neretva River in Jablanica, while in Croatia he documented sites like Kerestinec Castle and the Lora harbour in Split.

In an interview with Croatian newspaper Novi list in October 2016, Polan said that the beauty and power of photography are in its multi-dimensionality, and argued that "it is not necessary for photography to be shocking".

"Photography is determined by many other things as well as the context in which it is taken, so the way we read it depends...

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