Petar Dabac

Petar Dabac

Petar Dabac was born in 1942 in Zagreb. He graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Zagreb. He started working in photography in 1960 as an associate in Tošo Dabac’s studio - Tošo Dabac is one of the most important Croa-tian photograph of the post-war period, documenting the cultural transformations and the artistic and social events of his country - which he took over after Tošo’s death in 1970. He’s been working as an independent artist since 1966 and he’s been a member of ULU-PUH (The Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts) since 1970. From 1980 to 1987, he organized around 40 photo exhibitions of local and international authors at the gallery established within Tošo Dabac’s Studio.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, it was increasingly difficult to maintain the Tošo Dabac Archive, so that Petar Dabac launched negotiations with the City of Zagreb on the purcha-se of the collection.
He is one of the founders of SPOT, a photography magazine, launched in 1972.
Frm 1990 to 2008, he teached Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. In the sixties, he began working on a series of black-and-white portraits of artists, acquaintances, friends and members of the art scene, which he continued to create during the following decades. He belongs to a generation of artists who introduced the conceptual approach to photography in the 1970s by creating spatial installations and doing experiments with photocopies and photograms.

Dabac, Petar