The Spot Gallery and the Office for Photography invite you to the opening of the exhibition as part of the program line “Young SPOTs” dedicated to young authors. The opening of the exhibition Guard me, fierce dogs by the artist Ilija Jan Vuletić will be held on Monday, April 20th 2026 at 7:00 p.m., and the conversation with the author will start at 7:30 p.m. The exhibition will remain open until Wednesday, April 29th 2026.
Ilija Jan Vuletić, from the series “Guard me, fierce dogs”, 2023 – 2025
“You can take a good picture of anything”, said William Eggleston, one of the most influential photographers of the second half of the 20th century, whose colour photographs of the American South changed the course of photography as a medium. Susan Sontag wrote that, in “photography’s early decades, photographs were expected to be idealized images”.1 Put simply, a beautiful photograph used to mean a photograph of something beautiful. Over time, however, photographers – especially ambitious professionals, “those whose work gets into museums”2 – turned to ordinary, kitsch, or superficial subjects, redefining what is beautiful and what is ugly, both in photography and in the real world.
In the exhibition Guard Me, Fierce Dogs, Ilija Jan Vuletić also turns his attention to the ordinary – to what has been discarded and what is frightening – while, in this case, laying bare an intimate subject. What is a man, what does he look like, how does he behave, must he be aggressive, can he show tenderness, and how to break the cycle of toxic masculinity? These are some of the questions the exhibition raises, prompted by a poetic text written on CDs installed throughout the space. Unlike a typical accompanying essay, poetry explains less and suggests more, leaving room for interpretation while keeping company with the photographs.
The black-and-white photographs are the ones most closely tied to the text in narrative terms, while the colour images connect the threads of the story more associatively. The series depicts damaged car bodies, overgrown brush, weapons, and scars, while crocheted doilies, a kilim, and a wooden rosary hanging from a rear-view mirror place it in a nostalgic Balkan setting. Yet the nostalgia in Ilija’s photographs is not romantic; the artist does not long for some idealized past, but creates a world in which he accepts things as they are, with both their good and bad sides. This fictional world is woven from fragments of personal experience, friends’ stories, and random scenes he encounters in his everyday life. In this way, a relationship emerges between the personal and a broader understanding of masculinity as a theme. Stepping onto the car mats, which transpose the atmosphere of the auto repair shop depicted in the photographs into the gallery, visitors are invited to experience the story firsthand.
Dora Meštrović
1 Sontag, Susan. “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly.” in: On Photography, New York, Rosetta Books, 2005., 22.
2 Ibid.
Ilija Jan Vuletić, from the series “Guard me, fierce dogs”, 2023 – 2025
Ilija Jan Vuletić (Zagreb, 2001) attended the Archdiocesan Classical Gymnasium in Zagreb and later enrolled at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb. He began to pursue photography more seriously in 2020, initially through street photography and without a clearly defined conceptual starting point. He found his first stronger impetus toward art photography in the work of William Eggleston, which prompted him to reflect on the meaning of his own photographs and their expressive potential. During this period, he photographed motifs of stereotypical Balkan architecture. Later, he became acquainted with the work of Bryan Schutmaat, Gregory Halpern, Raymond Meeks, Mike Brodie, and other photographers working within the tradition of so-called lyric documentary photography. His current approach to photography has been shaped in particular by Alec Soth and Matthew Genitempo, whose influence led him to shift the focus of his work away from the direct depiction of objects and toward photography as a metaphor for the human condition. His work was exhibited in the lobby of Foto Studio Centre in Ilica in 2024. In 2025, he self-published the short zine Trust and Bleed, which explores the theme of childhood trauma.
