Tošo Dabac

Tošo Dabac
Tošo Dabac in 1951
Born	Teodor Eugen Marija Dabac (1907-05-18)18 May 1907 Nova Rača, Austria-Hungary
Died	9 May 1970(1970-05-09) (aged 62) Zagreb, SFR Yugoslavia
Nationality	Yugoslav / Croatian
Known for	Photography

Tošo Dabac (pronounced [toʃo dabats]; 18 May 1907 – 9 May 1970) was a Croatian photographer of international renown. Although his work was often exhibited and prized abroad, Dabac spent nearly his entire working career in Zagreb. While he worked on many different kinds of publications throughout his career, he is primarily notable for his black-and-white photographs of Zagreb street life during the Great Depression era.

Dabac was born in the small town of Nova Rača near the city of Bjelovar in central Croatia. After finishing primary school in his home town, his family moved to Samobor. He enrolled at the Royal Classical Gymnasium (Kraljevska klasična gimnazija) in Zagreb, and upon graduation, at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Law. In the late 1920s, Dabac worked for the Austrian film distribution company Fanamet-Film. After it closed down, he was employed by the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer subsidiary in Zagreb, where he worked as a translator and as their press officer for Southeast Europe between 1928 and 1937. After he dropped out of law school in 1927, he became the editor of Metro Megafon magazine.

Dabac's earliest surviving photograph is a panorama of Samobor, taken on 7 March 1925. His work was first shown publicly at an amateur exhibition held in the small town of Ivanec in 1932. The pioneering gallery hosting this exhibition later contributed to the development of photography in the country by publishing Croatian-language editions of the European art photography magazine Die Galerie in 1933 and 1934. In 1932 Dabac began working as a professional photojournalist in collaboration with Đuro Janeković.

A year after his first exhibition, Dabac's works were selected for exhibition at the Second International Photography Salon in Prague in 1933 along with works by František Drtikol and László Moholy-Nagy. In the same year, his photographs were put on display in the Second Philadelphia International Salon of Photography held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art along with works by Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Outerbridge, Ilse Bing and others, in an exhibition curated by art historian Beaumont Newhall.