The new Elvira Kohn collection contains a large number of post-war official and private photographs by one of Croatia’s first female photojournalists. Besides the pictures she took on assignment, Elvira Kohn often photographed nature, friends, children and the people dear to her. It is precisely this blend of the official and the private that makes the collection so valuable, as it reveals to the public, for the first time, what is in effect her intimate diary.

The Unwanted Images project is dedicated to researching, digitizing, and preserving photographic records of the Partisan and antifascist struggle — images that today remain suppressed, lost, or erased from official history. Our mission is to confront ongoing historical revisionism and to restore the visibility of the antifascist legacy through publicly accessible archives, exhibitions, and educational programs. We work outside institutional frameworks, relying on solidarity, collaboration, and shared responsibility for safeguarding collective memory.

Your support helps us to: acquire and preserve photographic negatives and prints, process and archive materials, protect endangered collections from disappearing, make the archive publicly accessible, and preserve the visual memory of resistance, freedom, and human dignity.

Donations can be made directly to the organization’s IBAN account KOLEKTOR - Centar za vizualne umjetnosti with the payment description “donation”: HR7023600001102465123, Zagrebačka banka, swift: ZABAHR2X. Thank you for helping us continue our work.

Gal Kirn, in his new book "The Memory of Liberation: Studies on the People's Liberation Struggle in the (Post-) Yugoslav Context" (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts), dedicates one chapter to photographic material from the Unwanted Images archive, in which he explores the representation of liberation, women, and partisan printing houses. Read more...