Milorad Cakardic was born in 1966 in Osijek, Republic of Croatia. He finished High School of Photography in his hometown and after the further education in his occupation, he passed occupational exam and became a photographer. On Academy IVAS he gained the occupation of photo-publicist and was accepted in the membership of PPofE (Association of Professional Photographers of Europe). He is a member of NPPA (The National Press Photographers Association), Durham, North Carolina, USA, member of USUF (Association of Self-Governing Artists of Photography) Serbia and a member of the Photo-Club OSIJEK, Republic of Croatia.
Photographs present author's opinion about the world that surrounds him and in which he found himself, the beauty of nature and architecture, but along with that they also show the less beautiful side of reality. Today, he participates in the great number of international exhibitions of photography (in Canada, Russia, Serbia, France, Croatia and Greece). Beside photography, he takes interest in graphic and web-design. Since 2004 he realized eight solo photo-exhibitions.
The most of the photographs are made with the classic film cameras NIKON F100, NIKON F401 and digital camera FUJI FINEPIX S3PRO (in combination with the Nikkor D and Sigma EX lenses), PRAKTICA BC 1 (in combination with the Carl Zeiss Jena DDR lenses) and the PENTACON SIX TL 6x6 camera (in combination with the Carl Zeiss Jena DDR MC Biometar 2,8 / 80 lens). Only a few photographs are taken with the SONY DCS F828 digital camera (Carl Zeiss lens 2-2,8 / 28-200mm). He lives and works in the Netherlands.
Catalogue text about author's last photo-exhibition:
PASSING BY 1979-2009
In the spirit of nowdays almost traditional and academic modernism of Middle European environment, Milorad Čakardić has aquired the basic photographic education in the school of photography, and that education has formed his basic attitudes and his work in the medium of photography, which are, luckily for his expression, entirely in accordance with his willingness while taking photographs. What’s the point of that much-vaunted modernism, which is aspired by the latter-day times to be disintegrated, whatever it costs? On the contrary of this age cynical apathy, here is the word about an age which used to have the vision how the world needed to look, and how the world must not look.
As the author himself has written, the photographs came to be as the results of collecting impressions about what he used to come across in the periode from 1979.-2009. While doing this he did not turn his camera toward every visual fenomena, but he chose the fragments synchronized with his own vision of the world through which he would like to move. The author feels the need for harmony above all, for wihich he, as a religious person, believes that exists in the Universe, so that it should be transferred on the Earth, too. As the matter of fact, a glimmer of that reflection of the heaven’s harmony he has succeeded to find in his usual worldly surrounding. If he were a musician, Čakardić would see it by Bach. But as his preoccupation is a kind of visual, he reveals it firstly in the space which people attempted to systematize according to general canons established in the discipline of architecture through the centuries.
Fascination of the photographer by the architecture is not accidental, because the composition of a photography has been constructed in the way the building has been constructed. Čakardić himself describes his process of previsualising, when he says that he encircles the space by his view first, and than he thinks about the details in it. On the grounds of it he aspires to arrange the elements in the way that each of them has found itself in the place which it belongs to, without disturbing each other, nothing to be supressed. It is a harmony, and at the same time, a justice, for which the author believes that shoud rule the world. Preoccupied by such ideals, he is not blind for reality. He mostly finds it by the deprived people from the bottom of a social scale, and in some details at which he looks back while passing by. These several features are reflected in the author’s basic topical preoccupations such as: architecture, nature, light for itself, the views from everyday life, artistic manufactures and marginal people’s creations.
When it is the word about life and people, Čakardić, although he is symphatetic to people, avoids the aspects of human suffering. He avoids the sensation-seeking attitude of a reportage photography, considering that its aim is not to awake the awarenes of public, but to feed the media consumers’ addiction of other people’s misery. According to this, he does not accept all the compositional and expressional tendences which developed in the photography in the late 50’s: the radical applicability of wide corners, falling horizons, inclinations which should have been vertical lines, sharp cuts of characters, gripping of accidental elements and other features of New avant-garda till nowdays. He avoids disquiet, disharmony, overcrowding and unsystematical relation of content elements of the so called Life photography. The lens which he uses are mainly tele-objectives, and he never abandons them.
So, Čakardić is not a photographer who would impose himself by the strengh of an explosive and uncompromising ego. He is a devoted, quite enthusiast for the whole visible reality by which he timidly and with an overall respect passes by, and who intends to make his impressions meaningful in the way that he would give them a godly sense. He does not beleive in coincidence, but in logos.Denis Božić
Translated by Ljiljana Vučković, prof.