Dragana Jurišić and Paula Meehan are associated through a collaborative portrait and book project rather than as a conventional photographic duo. Jurišić, born in Slavonski Brod, Croatia—then part of Yugoslavia—and based in Dublin, is a photographer, writer and filmmaker whose work also encompasses text, film and installation. Meehan is an Irish poet. Their meeting point is a sustained attention to portraiture, language and the ways an individual life can be held within cultural memory.

Jurišić’s practice is shaped by displacement and by the aftermath of the Balkan wars: accounts of her work note that she came to photography after losing her home and family photographs. This biographical rupture helps explain her interest in photographs not simply as descriptive records but as unstable carriers of remembrance. Across documentary-derived and staged approaches, she works with images alongside writing and moving image, allowing personal history, fiction and archival questions to remain in productive tension. In the collaboration with Meehan, photography is not treated as an autonomous likeness; it becomes a site where the poet’s presence and the viewer’s reading of it can unfold.

The project Museum, announced as a book with Meehan, is a key reference point for their shared record. A photographic portrait of Paula Meehan made in 2018 was shortlisted for the National Gallery of Ireland’s Zurich Portrait Prize in 2019. The work subsequently entered the Crawford Art Gallery collection in 2020. Those institutional contexts matter because they position the image both as an intimate encounter between artist and sitter and as a public object subject to collection, interpretation and preservation. Jurišić’s earlier photobook YU: The Lost Country, now out of print, provides an important backdrop to her concerns with the former Yugoslavia, loss and remembrance, even though it is not a Meehan collaboration.

For photobook readers, the Jurišić–Meehan connection is especially compelling where visual portraiture meets a poet’s sensibility. Museum offers a useful entry point, insofar as the available information identifies it as a book-length collaboration, while the National Gallery recognition and Crawford acquisition provide concrete evidence of the portrait’s public life. Collectors and readers should approach the work less as a straightforward celebrity or author portrait than as part of Jurišić’s broader inquiry into memory, identity and the relationship between image and text.

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