To mark the 60th anniversary of the Museum of Contemporary Art, the photographic portfolios of Clara Sipprell and Paul Strand are being, for the first time, presented together in their entirety. Their works entered the Museum’s Photography, Film and Video Collection as a form of institutional gift and diplomatic exchange between Yugoslavia and the United States in the 1980s.  A portfolio of one hundred photographs by Clara Sipprell was donated in 1981 through the Yugoslav Cultural Center in New York, while two portfolios by Paul Strand, comprising a total of twenty hand-printed photographs, were gifted to the Museum by the American Cultural Center in Belgrade in 1984.

The practices of Clara Sipprell and Paul Strand, developed in New York during the early decades of the twentieth century, are regarded as pivotal to the understanding of early American photography. Their artistic sensibilities evolved in parallel — Sipprell’s pictorial, poetic, and atmospheric approach, and Strand’s modernist precision and rigor of composition — offering a unique insight into the emergence and transformation of photographic expression in that period.

Distinct yet complementary methods open up a broader narrative on the history of the medium itself, recalling a time when photography was still asserting its autonomy and artistic status.

Clara Sipprell (1885–1975) was one of the foremost representatives of the American pictorialist movement and remained committed to its principles throughout her seventy-year career.
The exhibition presents sixty photographs from her portfolio A Photographic Journey through Yugoslavia, taken between 1924 and 1926. Inspired by the diversity of landscapes and the coexistence of nations and cultures, Sipprell photographed the Adriatic coast and cities such as Dubrovnik, Split, Rab, Kotor, Perast, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Sarajevo, among others.
She used soft focus and, at times, special lenses and filters that imbued her photographs with a warm and gentle tonal quality.

The Museum of Contemporary Art is among the few museums worldwide to hold Paul Strand’s portfolios in its collection.
Portfolios III and IV, comprising twenty photographs personally supervised by Strand, stand as a vital testament to the mature work of one of the twentieth century’s most important photographers and a pioneer of so-called “straight photography.”
The photographs presented in the exhibition — portraits and landscapes from the United States, France, Italy, and Egypt — are characterized by formal clarity, compositional precision, and a documentary sensibility. In many ways, this new modernist photography reflected and promoted the social and urban milieu of its time.

The exhibition title, Images of Another World, invites multiple associations: it evokes both a reflection on the past and the historical moment in which these photographs were created, and it highlights the travelogue as a visual diary of encounters with other environments and cultures.
It is precisely through this dual lens that the two portfolios reveal their distinctive and resonant narratives.

Curator: Una Popović