– Kranjčar Gallery, Zagreb, 2025
The Festival of World Literature, which for over a decade has brought together writers from around the world, is a place where literature meets its audience. In that space of dialogue, words become an oportunity for conversation, exchange, and new readings. Photographer Anto Magzan has spent years capturing those moments, building a gallery of portraits in which writers reveal themselves not only through their work, but in their full human presence. His photographs, made during the festival days, are more than a documentary record of an event — they bear witness to the complexity of moments in which an author becomes a face before an audience, a person in encounter with their readers.
Magzan’s portraits capture what photography does best: the way someone stands, observes, or occupies a space. His approach draws on a kind of diary logic, he seems to keep a personal record of the festival through the faces that move through it. Each image in the series reads like a fragment from a notebook; Anto himself describes it as personal reading — a fleeting moment noted down, a striking gesture, an unrepeatable glance. Every portrait carries its own private universe: eyes searching for the lens, hands folded quietly across a chest, a smile that opens the door to dialogue.
– From the foreword by Leila Topić, art historian and curator
