Raw and dark with a hint of existentialism – the ethos of Goran Popovski’s photographic work doesn’t stray far from his own persona, a self-determining experimental provocateur with sharp opinions who’s bored with traditional techniques and well-acquainted with Britney Spears’ trajectory into celeb madness. “Britney went crazy in 2007 and then I started with photography. We both went crazy,” he tells me.
I ask him to start at the beginning, when his passion for the art form began. As a kid, Goran recounts, he wanted to be a fashion designer. From there he gravitated towards becoming a painter, until one day when he took some photos of his friends to create his next painting. “I opened them in Photoshop and it was instant love. When my friend saw the pictures she was like, ‘You should totally try photography, leave the painting shit.’ So I just went on.”
Today his brand, HLVK (which, by the way, doesn’t stand for anything – “it’s my personal playground,” as he puts it), keeps its lens trained on just one subject, the one that inspires him most: women. His long-running series entitled Girls by HLVK features a riveting array of the most intriguing faces ever spot-lit. At times they’re ethereal and alien-like, then trash-glam, aloof, monarchical. From editorials to campaigns, his work conveys an instinct, an eloquence in capturing faces, a fluency in light and shadow.
“I have no words to describe my girls because…Girls by HLVK, that’s it,” and he laughs. “I think that I photograph really exceptional women. When I do shoots, I spend most of my time on casting and looking at girls, finding new faces. I think my girls are fierce and glamorous with a touch of death. My whole brand is about girls and women and them embracing themselves and being united against anything that is happening right now. We’ve seen women being photographed all through the ages, and I don’t want to act like I invented hot water or something, but I think that my girls are really bringing it.”
“I think that I photograph really exceptional women.”
It’s true that he’s not the first photographer to worship at the altar of the female form. He points to Nick Knight, Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton as the artists who’ve most influenced the development of his aesthetic. “My holy trinity,” he says, “because no one does women like that. We have Nick who experiments with the women. We have Guy who makes them sexual with color, with everything, the setup, the lighting. And then we have Helmut who is like erotica, everything I want to see when I look at a photograph of women: strong, independent, sexual, out there, in your face. I really like that and I think that every woman should be photographed in that way, in your face, look-at-me style because women are strong, after all. My brand is all about women. No one else. No exceptions. Every woman is beautiful and deserves to be treated like a saint.”
Although I attempt to remain impartial, I can hardly disagree with such a statement and babble something incoherent about “loving that, loving that.”
In addition to this trifecta of powerhouse photographers, Goran names music and film as his primary sources of inspiration. “If I listen to a good album, I can get inspired immediately because I see the images moving right in front of my eyes. I feel the vibe. I know the poses. I instantly start drawing some sketches. And after that I figure out the main moods of the whole shoot.”
The skill didn’t appear overnight; Goran says it took him years to learn to convert these sparks of an idea into something actionable. He believes anyone can do it. “That’s my advice for every aspiring photographer: watch movies, listen to music and explore because it’s your direction, it’s your vision and if you have the power to bring your vision to life exactly as you wanted it, you got it all.”
“If you have the power to bring your vision to life exactly as you wanted it, you got it all.”
As for his go-to film for inspiration, he names Suspiria, a 1977 horror flick from director Dario Argento, hailed by critics as a visual and stylistic masterpiece within the genre. “If you haven’t seen the movie, see it. It’s bad acting right from the start… but a lot of amazing scenery. The neon colors…in the 70s no one did neon colors like that.”
At this point, we’ve pretty well established that contemplation of others’ creative work is an important component to fueling Goran’s, or anyone’s, own artistic endeavors. (We spent over a third of our total interview time on the subject, including a compelling if less relevant tangent on how annoying it is that Balkan grandmothers gossip about why you haven’t had a wedding and/or babies yet.)
But when it comes to that burst of creative momentum, Goran says that nothing delivers more reliably than a wild night out. “Most of my concepts and image inspirations were written in clubs when I’m partying and I’m feeling it, everything’s good, the strobe hits and then I grab my phone and start typing. Especially the dirty, dirty clubs where you don’t want to go to the bathroom because you’re afraid the air will get you infected. Those are the clubs that have the most inspiration in them because whenever someone goes there and dances and leaves their energy, I imagine that I grab the pieces of energy and create my own characters, which are later given life with my images.”
Perhaps he’s right and it is in fact the energy particles of riotous clubgoers that animates the spirit of his photographs. I can believe it – his work displays such range, but there are pictures in his Girls by HLVK series that leave me with a sense of “it’s 4am in a place you don’t want to see with the lights on,” when the headlining DJ has finally started his set and things are just getting good. Yeah, that feeling, plus an injection of the esoteric.
So obviously I have to ask him about his favorite clubs in the cities where he spends his time. Skopje: Kapan An, once an Ottoman inn built in the fifteenth century, entering the nightclub scene in the 1980s. Belgrade: Drugstore, set in a former slaughterhouse and boasting a brutal industrial atmosphere. Berlin: Berghain, which Goran names at the risk of sounding like “the most mainstream hipster girl. Go there and be ready for anything. I mean, I’ve seen stuff there.”
Of these three diverse cities, Goran’s favorite place to shoot is undoubtedly Belgrade. “I’m in love with Belgrade but cheating on it with Berlin,” he confesses. “Berlin brings out the worst part of me but I like it.”
There’s a question I’ve been dying to ask him but I’m not sure how to put it. Goran’s already shared with me that some days he’s not really sure if he’s Serbian or Macedonian. “It’s a confusion,” he says, and I believe it, as he’s often bouncing between Belgrade and Skopje and has strong community in both capitals. As for the urgency of my question, I’ve long been fascinated with identity development in young states, and particularly in Ex-Yugoslavian countries where the lines between language, nationhood and culture are so often fluid and undeniably linked by a complicated and shared history. Rather than laboring over the most politically correct way to pose the query, I decide to imitate Goran’s direct style and simply ask it.
“Do you consider yourself a ‘Balkan’ photographer? Does such a thing exist?”
He mulls it over. “I don’t know…I consider myself a photographer of the world. In photography we don’t do races, we don’t do who’s from where, we don’t do any of that kind of stuff. Political or not political. We just do beauty and we explore different dimensions with it. I know that I have the equation now, I just need the result. I will be the photographer of the world.”
