" In the series of photographs by Ana Opalić entitled Self-portraits, which has to be considered as work in progress, signified melancholy has been deployed in the sense of a rhetorical figure the performative of which is manifested in 'providing a way out of the melancholy of normative femininity'. Notably, within the discursive space of each individual photographic image which structures the self-portrait, melancholy, as a rhetorical figure, is produced by the relation between the author's figure- its place, the mode of its positioning in space - and the landscape captured in the frame. In that frame we often see something that can, culturologically, be perceived as a melancholic scene: a solitary figure positioned in a specific 'wild', rock-bound landscape, or on a cliff overhanging the sea from which the view, paradoxically, extends into infinity..." In the series of photographs by Ana Opalić entitled Self-portraits, which has to be considered as work in progress, signified melancholy has been deployed in the sense of a rhetorical figure the performative of which is manifested in 'providing a way out of the melancholy of normative femininity'. Notably, within the discursive space of each individual photographic image which structures the self-portrait, melancholy, as a rhetorical figure, is produced by the relation between the author's figure- its place, the mode of its positioning in space - and the landscape captured in the frame. In that frame we often see something that can, culturologically, be perceived as a melancholic scene: a solitary figure positioned in a specific 'wild', rock-bound landscape, or on a cliff overhanging the sea from which the view, paradoxically, extends into infinity..."

(Leonida Kovač, Somewhere, 2003)

Portraits, 2008-1997

"... From the years of her practise as a photographer, Ana Opalić has selected a series of pictures that something -not violently but nevertheless convincingly-
pulls into a cogent whole. What is this something?
Is it perhaps the generic unity (the portrait or the double portrait)? Is it the relationship of the figures to the space (external and internal)? Is it the gaze that all the models direct towards the eye of the camera, clearly aware of its presence, towards the camerawoman's lens? The very circumstance that all of the people portrayed are looking into the camera says that they have not been caught out,
not taken by surprise, that this is a matter, rather, of a compact..."

(Igor Zidić - Children, women, men and the odd dog, 2006)