ANA STRAŽE (Celje, 1982) works from the small Slovenian city where she was born, yet her eye roams far beyond geography. Trained at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering in Ljubljana, where she completed a master’s degree in Photography in Contemporary Art in 2013, she has built a body of work that turns the ordinary into an arena of revelation. Her photographs invite us to look again at the things we overlook, to witness the fragile border where beauty, decay, habit, and desire meet.

Straže’s practice follows a simple but demanding ethic: attention. In her hands, an object becomes a threshold. A flower shifts into a meditation on ephemerality. Food becomes a riddle of longing and restraint. A fragment of nature becomes a record of both distance and intimacy. She embraces the tension between the aesthetic and the everyday and works at the point where the visual world begins to murmur about something deeper.

Her series Garden of Eden (2013 to 2016) marked a turning point, expanding the vocabulary of contemporary Slovenian photography. The project is now part of the permanent collection of the Center for Contemporary Arts in Celje. Other major cycles, such as Dog Days, These Flowers Will Never Die, Apathy, Malcolm, and Forbidden Food, continue this exploration of the seen and the half felt, where stillness carries its own quiet suspense.

Since 2013 her work has appeared widely in both solo and group exhibitions, including the Plevnik Kronkowska Gallery, the Gallery of Contemporary Art Celje, AQ Gallery, Vžigalica Gallery in Ljubljana, Tribeca Factory Interiors in Italy, and the Celje FOKUS Festival of Authorial Photography.

Her images have also traveled through print and digital platforms across Europe, Asia, and North America. Features include PetaPixel, Colossal, F Stop Magazine, PhotoVogue (Vogue Italia), DELO, Digital Camera, PLAIN Magazine, and collaborations with The Artling in Singapore and Shanghai and Uncoated Editions in the Netherlands.

Straže has been recognized with international awards such as Le Prix de la Photographie de Paris in 2019, the International Photography Awards in Los Angeles in 2016, the Julia Margaret Cameron Award in 2011, and EMZIN’s Photo of the Year in 2010. These achievements speak only partly to her presence. Her real distinction is the clarity of her gaze.

In a world saturated with images, Ana Straže continues to look slowly. Her photographs remind us that the world does not need embellishment. It needs attention and the courage to see what is already there.

More of her work may be appreciated on her website.