Unusual Family Peculiarities by Josip Miskovic

This project narrate my search for belonging and describe my evolution as a photographer, conducted over the last three years, in which I lived as a stranger or “migrant” in a foreign land, having to recreate my roots and research my origin.

Photos are from different periods, some have a few years while the others are more recent. The characters that appear in the images are essential parts of my affective memory, parts of my past and my present, and are united by the bond that unites them. The portrait of my father, dug in the face by time and hard work, is analogous to the first photo, “Baraka”, which also depicts a house marked by the passing of time, so much so that the person who returns there finds her crumbling, as the daughter who returns home after years finds his aged father. The search for roots and the redefinition of my identity along my way also pass through the observation of nature, and to be honest in this new country the beauty abounds! Picture with horses “Sibilini Mountains”, picture of two swans on “lake di Garda”. Other characters in the pictures represent my family and people who are in some way “familiar” with this type of experience, as foreigners or as “uprooted” people who often use the memory as proof of their existence and belonging to this world. Each picture is a fragment of the only self-portrait that they all compose.

About Josip Miskovic

My name is Josip Miskovic and I’m 36. I was born in Bosnia, a difficult land, where my family is part of the Croatian minority. I met the war, which marked my vision of the world. In my native land, where the differences have always existed, I learned to live with them and when I had to leave it, to move abroad (in Italy), those differences became my characteristic, I became “the different”, “the stranger”. So I had to rebuild stability in a distant place and I made photography part of this  not only an artistic research, but my way to rediscover the identity and my roots, through images. Images that come from my present, or from my memory, or, again, images that shape my dreams of the future, through fantasy.