Živko Bačić Živko Bačić was born in Lukoran on the island of Ugljan. He attended elementary school in Lukoran and neighbouring Preko, whereas in Zadar he went to secondary school.

As early as in elementary school, he showed interest in photography, completing a photography course in the 7th grade, and exhibiting his first photographic work as a secondary school student. Immediately after completing his secondary school education in 1965, he moved to Split, where the following year he became a member of the Photo Section of the “Ruđer Bošković” Student Association (later called “Ruđer Bošković” Photo Club). In 1967 he started having exhibitions as a member of that photo club, which he even headed for some time. He started having solo exhibitions in 1977. From 1974, he worked as a photographer in the Regional Institute for the Protection of Culture Monuments in Split, from which – now called Directorate for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, Conservation Department in Split – he retired in 2013. He still takes photos of monuments and works of art, cooperating with his former employer, as well as with other cultural institutions in Croatia. His photos have been published in a number of national and international magazines, technical publications and books. In addition to tens of thousands of cultural heritage photos, his extensive work also includes art photography. He is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts (ULUPUH). He won an award of the 1983 Split Salon and a collective “Vicko Andrić” award for the year 2001.

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In his photos, Živko Bačić has archived almost the entire art inventory of cultural heritage on the Croatian coast, from Dubrovnik to Poreč. Some of his photos have become the cradle of older Croatian art, not only as first-class conservation documents, but also as specific studies of particular works of art which he would many times characterize more strongly than in many pages written by his colleagues conservators with whom we cooperated on a daily basis. This modest selection of photographs from a wide variety of his works illustrates the extent to which Bačić has enriched iconographic images of Croatian urban and landscape surroundings.

His photographs were as a rule taken with a personal attitude full of empathy, sometimes with a trace of repressed humour. The motif which he likes to photograph is simple in structure, but as a rule emotionally orchestrated, most often giving a sense of poetic melancholy. If there is a common denominator among all such images, then it most frequently results from his sensibility to capture the atmosphere of his home region which is undergoing gradual transformation in the unavoidable rush of globalization. The images his eyes capture in the morning are long gone in the evening, even if it seems to us that God made them permanent. I am afraid that many of his photographs are among the last lyrical documents in the calm periods before the storm which will definitely transform our home region into a European playground.