Olga Karlovac is a self-taught abstract and street photographer, born in Dubrovnik and based in Zagreb, Croatia. She trained as an economist. She got her first camera, a Canon T70, from her father as a child, and came back to photography in her thirties. She works only in black and white, mostly after dark and in the rain, often from a moving tram or car. Rain on the window, motion blur and light pollution are part of her pictures. She shoots with a Ricoh GR.
She is best known for her trilogy of self-published photobooks, Before Winter, The Disarray and Escape. Her work has appeared in Black+White Photography, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Der Standard. She has had solo exhibitions in London, Zagreb and New York, among them Fitzrovia Gallery in London and Modro Gallery in Zagreb in 2023. In 2025 she was on the jury of the Urban Photo Awards.
Her fourth book, Elsewhere (self-published, 2024), took about three years to make. It brings together 94 black-and-white photographs of night streets, trams and figures that dissolve in rain and motion, with a foreword by Tracy Calder. She sequenced the book herself before working with a designer.
