Branimir Džoni Štulić

Štulić long ago earned the right to be presented to his admirers, as well as to the broader public, not only through conventional biographies (of which there are already several), but also through a book like this one — a document of Džoni’s final tour. In many ways, it communicates on the same wavelength and level as Azra’s finest songs and albums — saying a great deal with only a few carefully chosen words and images (there poetic, here photographic), which everyone can and must pass through the filters of their own thoughts, knowledge, and beliefs about who and what that mysterious ‘man with the impossible diction’ truly was, in order to arrive at its message and essence.

In that sense, Dušan Vesić’s introductory text is in complete harmony with the visual portion of the book, because even to the best connoisseurs of Štulić and his body of work it offers a vast bundle of keys for a deeper and fuller understanding of him.

And Kamenko Pajić’s photographs, beyond their supreme craftsmanship, bring another major quality — one largely forgotten in this era of overwhelming informational noise, in which it often seems that everyone knows, or can know, everything about everyone. To anyone who followed Azra and Džoni with even the slightest attention (and there are many such people, as well as many more who still will), it will become perfectly clear after the very first paging through the book that these photographs could only have been made by someone who deeply understood both Štulić and his songs, and who, perhaps even more importantly, knew how to transform what the artist and his work represented into a competent, consistent, inspired, and creative vision of a brief yet significant moment in a remarkable career, Vladimir Stakic wrote