Maša Stanić
Belgrade, Serbia
Bio:
Maša Stanić (*1994) is a Serbian-Austrian photographer and artist. Her work is an intimate, yet raw hybrid of portrait, editorial and reportage photography that roughly centers around the beauty of ugliness. Stanić masters this paradox by trusting in a modus operandi of serendipity and spontaneous impulsivity: Identify what you’re working with. And then work with it.
She studies Applied Photography and Time-Based Media at the University of Applied Arts. Since 2018, her work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in Vienna, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin, among others. Maša Stanić lives and works in Vienna.
Where are you from? Where are you now and can you tell us a little about how you got there?
My roots are Serbian, but I was born in Vienna (Austria) because my dad started to work there before my birth. But as a kid I was raised half in Belgrade and half in Vienna. Always switching between places. Now I am still in Vienna, finishing my studies (hopefully soon haha) and working.
What was it that originally got you into taking photographs?
My parents bought a small digital camera for vacations when I was about 15 years old and I started goofing around with it.
At some point I just knew that photography is going to be THE thing for me.
How would you describe your style and aesthetic?
Raw yet intimate and impulsive.
How do you go about coming up with ideas of what you want to capture?
Mostly it happens very naturally. It’s just like an impulse that I’m following, not even knowing why I find that interesting. For me things just need to be odd, with no necessary explanation or background.
So mostly it’s spontaneity combined with outer influence (friends, happenings, energy shifts between me and other creatives). the environment and the energy I try to absorb out of that is the most important factor for me and my work.
How have you found the pandemic has affected your work recently?
Well it changed it quite radically at the beginning because my photography is mostly based on everything which is not possible during a pandemic (friends, gatherings, partys, etc) but i managed to put my focus on some other things which i was planning to do anyways but never really had the time for.
After I got used to the fact that we are living in the middle of a pandemic and that times are different now I also came back to photography but of course not in the same way as before. Which is nothing bad because it forces you to evolve and get out of your comfort zone and try out other ways and experiment again.
Where to next?
Where the flow brings me to.
Have you any projects lined up for 2021?
Well, under pandemic circumstances I stopped planning concrete projects, which is nothing bad to me. Of course I have plans but I just don’t fixate myself on them.
Just staying busy and try to hustle every day, that’s my plan. Whatever direction it may take me.
Where can we find you online?
