Untitled, 5 x 5 inches, unique gelatin silver print (early work, 2007)
Born in Sarajevo, Bosnia, Svjetlana Tepavcevic is currently based in the Washington D.C. area, but maintains a connection with Los Angeles, her longtime home. In the early 1990s, she witnessed the breakup of her country in a bloody war, and lived through the siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a European city in modern history. Near the end of the war, she left for the United States, and is now an American citizen.
She holds a B.A. from University of California at Los Angeles and an M.A. from University of Pennsylvania, both in communication studies. She took as many art history courses as she could and began studying photography in the fall of 2006, never owning a camera prior to that. In the digital era, she chose to learn traditional black-and-white photography first, which connected her to the history of the art form and the artists whose work she has long admired.
Contemplative, interpretive, and uniquely expressed, her work explores the world around her through detailed and long-term observation, and centers on how she relates to her subjects. Various prints from her series of abstract black-and-white seascapes entitled The Sea Inside, her first significant and ongoing body of work, were purchased for private collections throughout the country, including a print for the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Select images from The Sea Inside were shown in a solo multimedia exhibition at Griffin Museum in Winchester, Mass.; in a portfolio show juried by Dr. Anthony Bannon in Atlanta, Ga.; at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colo.; and in various shows in Los Angeles.
Svjetlana Tepavcevic's work was selected as a finalist in Photolucida's Critical Mass contest, and received a third place and an honorable mention from the Lucie/ International Photography Awards, and honorable mentions from PX3 Prix de la Photographie and from the Black and White Spider Awards.