Jump of Stjepan Erdödy

Karlo Drašković (Bratislav, 1873 – Vienna, 1900) was into photography at the time when the new national Romanticism took hold of and suffused social and cultural life; his preoccupations are clear to us from his freely chosen motifs. He took shots of folk costumes, peasants, landscapes and architecture. The first extant pictures derive from 1892. He achieved great aesthetic and technical excellence in his photographs, and in 1895 he was admitted into membership of one of the elite European photographic clubs, the Wiener Camera Club. From the 1894–1899 period several hundred photographs of his have come down to us, including negatives, positives and slides. Particularly interesting are two frozen motion pictures – the Jump of Stjepan Erdödy of 1895, in which his uncle Stjepan jumped over a bench. Recording a moment of frozen movement, these are the first examples of what is called moment photography in Croatia and are among the earliest specimens of this kind of photography anywhere in the world. With naturalist portraits of people from the margins of society (Beggar, slide, 1894; Prisoners of Lepoglava, 1897) he brought the social trend into Croatian photography. His approach to landscape is recognised in the later-formed aesthetics of what was called the Zagreb School.