The Last Shot I

Pavo Urban (1968 - 1991) was educated at the Maritime Secondary School and the Maritime Faculty in Dubrovnik. Self-taught, he started photographing in secondary school, and was a member of the Marin Getaldić (Dubrovnik) photographic club. In September 1991 he won entrance into the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, film and TV camera department, but never started the course, deciding to stay in wartime Dubrovnik instead.
As early as September 29, 1991, he was on the front line in Župa Dubrovačka, and here started his wartime photographic oeuvre (rat-art/war-art). When Župa Dubrovačka fell, he returned to Dubrovnik and started working as war reporter for Dubrovački vjesnik and Slobodna Dalmacija as war reporter. It was in this capacity that he recorded the first shell to land on the historical city centre on October 26, 1991.
He carried out his job very conscientiously and systematically. In the early morning of December 6, 1991, he began to photograph the fiercest assault on the city. On this date, at the end of the dramatic series of 12 photographs shown here, he was killed, in the twenty third year of his life. Pavo Urban is a cult name in Croatian photography and one of the symbols of wartime Dubrovnik.