Oana Baković East Sussex, United Kingdom

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Oana M. Baković is a contemporary fine art photographer with a predilection for the wild and endangered flora, peculiar plants, big bodies of water & motion.

Oana M. Baković (@Mrv23) is a contemporary fine art photographer with a predilection for the wild and endangered flora, peculiar plants, big bodies of water & motion.

She was born in the port city of Constanta, on the shores of the Black Sea, to a Croatian father and a Romanian mother. Always a passionate photographer, she started by documenting her family life tangential to her work as an advertising professional.

In 2020 Oana finally focused more on her art, identifying that her interest lies mainly in the natural world and refining the technique of using a flash with ambient light and sometimes ND filters. The camera of her choice is a Fuji X100V.

Things started moving in the right direction when she participated and won first prize in a local photography art contest. The winning photograph of old Morris Minor was much praised in the local art community, which gave her confidence to go further.

By 2022, following her win at The Sony World Photography Awards, Aesthetica Magazine wrote, ‘Baković offers a fresh take on floral photography. The results are almost alien, highlighting the natural world from the inside. Seemingly small plants become towering giants in front of Baković’s lens, rendered in rich and saturated colour palettes.’

Oana is committed to the cause of saving the natural world by showing its exquisite beauty in detail, capturing simple magical moments as they happen, and always looking for unique locations where nature reigns.

It is essential to mention that she is not a still-life photographer. Her subjects are living, moving, thriving, or dying and always in their natural environment.

It is her fear of humanity losing its mindfulness of the surrounding nature that drives her on this journey to capture and share the sometimes overlooked beauty of the world we are part of. The artist likes to emphasise ‘nature’s flaws’ in her art, and no shift, beautification or arrangement must add to what nature created herself.

The single artificial element is the flashlight, which the artist uses to add a bit of contour to the fantastic microcosms of nature. She usually works during magic hours. The challenge of chasing interesting angles and intensities of natural light is the backbone of her approach.