About Bruna Stude
A decade ago, Bruna Stude – law school graduate and newspaper reporter, in a world where Croatian was few people's the first language – left her native Croatia to crew on yachts. Cruising the seas, she turned to photography to express herself. Soon she was photographing sharks off Burma and fishermen in Panama.
Growing up in the city of Split, on the Adriatic Sea, water has always been a part of Stude's life. Now her life's work focuses on the ocean and the things found in it.
She first went to Kaua'i to photograph whales, and she found a place to settle. "The waters were filled with whale song," says Stude. "Kaua'i is like a cross between living on the ocean and on land"
The Kaua'i resident collected some of her most striking images in In-Sight. The book includes images of the 'opihi, a limpet that caught her eye because of its similarity to the Adriatic's prilipak, which people also eat. Her extreme closeup, black-and-white studies of 'opihi reveal a ridged surface as elegant and element-eroded as columns of the Parthenon.
In Indonesia, Stude met the owner of the One Big Truth Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif. He liked her work and showed it in his gallery. Then her work was accepted for "The Art of Photography Show" at the Lyceum Theatre Gallery in San Diego. "That was the moment I felt photography might be more than my pet project," she says.
For Stude, it can take years of going to a place to get that exact moment when light, subject and water conditions are just right. "I wait so long," she says. "There are so many elements you have to take care of in the water."
Bruna Stude owns and directs Galerie 103, Kaua`i, Hawai`i
