Interview with Boogie
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Though Hollywood has tried to render apocalyptic worlds in scores of movies with fancy, multi-million dollar special effects, none of them has had the lasting, convincing verisimilitude of Boogie’s black-and-white photographs of real places and people. In one photograph, a child in the rough working-class Turkish suburb of Zeytinburnu curiously handles a pistol, his tiny fingers not yet mature enough to grasp its death-dealing power. In another, a wide shot of a barrio on the outskirts of Caracas resembles a claustrophobic collage of shanties, haunting and ominous in their far-reaching scale. Such images are certainly shocking to those living in the developed world, but for Belgrade-born photographer Boogie, every city contains small, overlooked pockets of disquietude and desolation.

The son of an amateur photographer, Boogie grew up resisting his father’s aspirations, uninterested in photography until he began collecting vintage bellows cameras during the early ‘90s, a period of economic and political sanctions against what was then the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He did not begin actively taking photographs until his father bought him a working camera, an Olympus OM-40 he used to capture the political theatre and violence of Belgrade’s streets. The grainy, gritty black-and-white of his earliest photographs remains Boogie’s trademark style, what he believes is perfect for “seeing things in a little darker way.” To this day, he repudiates digital cameras, preferring the distinct tonal values that film cameras allow.

“I started shooting B&W and the style stuck with me. There was a lot of madness, you know, with police and riots,” he says. The madness started when peaceful demonstrations against then-president Slobodan Milošević turned sour, and riot police began brutalizing protestors exasperated by a crumbling economy and a repressive regime. Belgrade’s spectacle of violence and poverty, of people living on the fringes of society, sharpened Boogie’s worldview as well as his photographic eye for the darker depths of human existence. Belgrade Belongs to Me, Boogie’s fifth published monograph, collects his starkest, most startling photographs of a city poisoned by police brutality, xenophobia and hunger.

In 1997, Boogie and his friends, after a night of drinking, decided to apply to the U.S. Diversity Immigrant Visa program. Better known as the Green Card Lottery, the program annually allots up to 50,000 permanent resident visas to inhabitants of countries with low rates of immigration to the U.S. By happenstance, Boogie was the only one of his friends to be chosen; the next year, he moved to New York City, working various odd jobs before settling on a career in photography.

Happenstance and serendipity are recurring threads in Boogie’s life, and he takes what fortuitous events occur in his life in stride. Twenty years ago, his friends nicknamed him “Boogie” after the “boogieman” from an old film, and the moniker has since stuck with him. During his early years in New York, he encountered his first major project again by happenstance, a three-year undertaking which led him deep into the deep criminal underbelly of Brooklyn.

It’s All Good, his first published monograph, contains images of crack addicts and drug dealers in the neighborhoods of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy. The violence and desperation of Brooklyn came naturally to Boogie’s attention—although almost halfway across the world from his hometown Belgrade, the egregious poverty and bleakness of Brooklyn echoed familiar narratives. His venture into drug and gang culture commenced when Boogie, weary of the affluent hipster environs of his Williamsburg residence, began exploring the more marginalized sections of his borough. A friendship sparked with a local crack addict who allowed him to take pictures of her and her friends, and after several promising encounters with local Bloods both intrigued by and curiously unwary of a white Serbian man with a camera, they too invited him to take pictures of their lives.

Speaking with Boogie over the phone makes it easy to understand why drug addicts and gang members, people with understandable suspicion of strangers, would open up to him. His Serbian accent recalls none of the cadences of figures they may regard with suspicion, his unassuming and easygoing manner of speech disarms, and his attitude conveys an affability and humility that put people at ease. The three years spent photographing the denizens of Brooklyn culminated in six stories and 109 photographs each containing its own set of visual narratives—stories of crack-addicted parents raising children who know little about the world outside their microcosm of addiction, of a former champion boxer whose career took an unfortunate turn when his drug habits ravaged his physique, and of young gang members sustaining “normal” teenage lives against a backdrop of violence and murder.

“I realized after doing my first book on gangs and drugs, I was in a hole. I couldn’t get inspired by anything that wasn’t a gun or needle. When I snapped out of it, it really became amazing. I saw beauty everywhere. I realized that good shots are everywhere. You don’t have to chase after extremes or go to Iraq or whatever to make a good shot. It’s all in your head,” Boogie says. His subsequent endeavors, which have taken him from places as dystopian as Mexico City and utopian as Tokyo, is marked by a keen eye for detail and the unobvious. A recent photograph from his tour in Italy displays an ordinary bar scene, but it draws the viewer’s eye to the unexpected, a small framed photo of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the background. In a single image, Boogie, like an expert documentarian, distills the surprising tensions and complexities of Italian culture and politics.

“I just walk around and follow my heart. In a way, I like for the images to come to me. You try to dig as deep as possible but usually in a week or two weeks you can’t do much. You can’t really get to know people, and it’s not very deep. When you travel you always have limited time. You can’t relax and let everything take its course. I start shooting right away, usually at the airport. The first couple rolls suck. To get in tune with the city, it takes time. You have to start shooting right away to get there. You don’t want to shoot obvious things,” Boogie says. The pressure of time and distance focuses his attention to unordinary details. Like a fly on a wall, he carefully observes the geography and margins of a city, recording its visual heartbeat through photographs of street signs, posters, graffiti, tattoos, stray animals and candid moments. And, as is often the case with Boogie, happenstance plays a part as well.

Boogie captures images of enigmatic figures and unsettling scenes of chaos that reveal a city’s subconscious — one shot, taken in Tokyo, frames an old man staring uneasily at a trail of black smoke rising from a distance. “Nothing out of order ever happens in Tokyo. It was five in the morning. I was jet-lagged and I saw a thick black smoke and there was a truck burning on the overpass, and I was like, ‘C’mon, not in Tokyo.’ That’s just one situation. Somehow it almost feels like you are attracting things…. When I was in Mexico City. . . all of a sudden there was a crowd of people and a cop on the ground. A taxi cab had hit the cop, and he was [just] lying [there]. Shit happens all the time.”

The subways, urban nature, cracked concrete and buildings which comprise the texture or rhythm of a city are common subjects in Boogie’s work, his conduits into a city’s hidden realities. Tattoos and graffiti also reveal the psychology of a city’s inhabitants, whether it be a white supremacist’s swastika markings in Belgrade or an “I love you” hastily scrawled on a freeway overpass in Tokyo. “I’m not into graffiti at all, I like texture much more than graffiti… but… you can’t avoid [it]. Every city is covered in [it]. Sometimes I like to see primitive graffiti, something that’s personal like “Jack loves Lisa”—very from-the-gut.”

Along with his documentary work, Boogie occasionally takes on commercial projects with clients like Nike, Altamont Apparel and Japanese label SHELLAC. When asked about differences between his commercial and creative work, Boogie says, “It’s [all] still me. No matter what I’m shooting, I never try to be anything else. I don’t try to emulate anybody else. They hire me for my style. . . . What really matters is the energy between you and people. The energy between the photographer and the model is what you can always see in the picture.”

Boogie’s latest travels to Milan have been captured in “5 Days,” an Avantgarden Gallery exhibition of photographs he took in the Italian city. Those images demonstrate that, as always, Boogie eschews the obvious landmarks of a city, instead documenting gritty, dispossessed elements. Explaining his documentary process, he says, “I shoot like a maniac. When I’m shooting, I’m on a mission. After a couple days, I just crash. You try not to shoot bullshit, things that are too obvious. I just feel the energy. I don’t think you can really explain it.”

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To see more photographs by Boogie, visit:  http://www.artcoup.com/
For more info on the “5 Days” exhibition, visit: http://www.avantgardengallery.com/

Published on 1 June 2009 | 4 |