My Belgrade

Boris Kralj's photography manifests everything that makes Belgrade so appealing, so morbidly fascinating, and so dense, built upon countless layers of histories and ideologies. Twenty years after the breakout of the Yugoslav Wars, this book is the evidence of one man’s impulse to document the remaining fragments of the Yugoslav idea in the Serbian capital. It is a nostalgic project that is done with an earnestness and a naivety of which only someone who has never lived there could be capable. The apparent nostalgia of this project is not reactionary, however, as it responds to a more progressive idea of a Yugoslav multiculturalism, all the while resisting any idealization of the past. It is a documentary effort that capitulates to big statements—an approach that would seem made for a region that bears so many traces of the propagandas of the past.