Farewell from the “media bench”

Zeljko Sinobad, photo editor at Ilustrovana Politika, one of the best photo reporters in Serbia, passed away in Belgrade at the beginning of the week to the journalistic scene – a master not only of newspaper but also of artistic photography.

photographs was present at guild and thematic exhibitions. He will be buried on Saturday in the Belgrade cemetery Lešće.
(That time has not passed, On November 2, he would have turned 59 years old. He liked to talk about how he was born in Belgrade by chance.

His family was originally from Dalmatia. He grew up in Voždovac and started doing photography as a high school student.

– I entered photography out of love, not understanding the difficulty of doing it. She still has some inexplicable magic for me, which is felt even by those who paint with a mobile phone. And while chemistry was still there, when you come in to take pictures – it was alchemy – he talked about his calling as an already well-known photojournalist and one of the best students and successors of the famous Tomislav Peternek.

He was proud that his “criticism of stupidity and idiocy” followed him from the first photograph “Waiting in line for the toilet”, taken when five public toilets were destroyed in Belgrade, which associated him with the whole of the former Yugoslavia.

He spent almost his entire working life in “Politika” and “Politika AD” working for various editions of this newspaper.

He was a member of Ulupuds, winner of numerous awards with even more group and author exhibitions in his four-decade-long career.

He traveled half the planet with a camera and captured many social, political and historical events in the domestic and world media, but he never regretted that he could not record the events in the “Storm” action with his lens.

– I didn’t have it allowed. My heart broke then that I could not notice what was happening to my compatriots. And my compatriots are all… In my opinion, everything in this exhibition is related to Krajina and Serbs here, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes… I tried not to hurt anyone. I did not work out of hatred, although I am full of bitterness and resentment towards those who claim to be the best presidents in the history of Serbia, as if that history is several years of their mandate, he said in the only interview we did for Danas.

The occasion was his exhibition “Testimony of Fire and Darkness” in 2018, which depicts the events in the former SFR Yugoslavia from the demonstrations of Albanian students in Pristina in 1981 to various riots, wars, accidents and misery in the second decade of the 21st century.

The last time his works in front of the audience were on the exhibition “My Choice”, which was closed on the last day September

It’s not easy to write about your couple from elementary school.

We later, when we met on the way on a journalistic assignment, called it a “media bench” – a journalist and a photo reporter came out of it and shared a critical charge towards the world around them to the end.

“We checked” – he me in the texts, I him in the photos, commenting and comparing impressions about the people and events we dealt with.

I know that my couple from the bench would seriously object to the end of the first sentence of this text because “he did not divide photography, as well as other things, into artistic and non-artistic”.

In the end, in his case there was no difference.

– For me, the art is to be able to do something, even to cook an espresso that everyone will come to with pleasure. In English, an artist is more of an entertainer. That is why I do not divide photography, as well as other things, into artistic and non-artistic. Photography has an incredible feature of documentary, which no other art has in that way. In addition to documentaries, a good photograph must have aesthetics, a story and a message, to arouse emotions and start thinking – that is how Željko Sinobad spoke, painted and lived.