Life in the New: Rajić

Most garages in the apartment blocks on Jurija Gagarina street are used for parking or simply for extra storage for the people living there. For 77-year-old Rajić, it’s where he gets his work done. He uses the garage in Blok 63 as a workshop for his upholstery business while living in the eastern part of Novi Beograd. For 15 years, he has hammered tacks, padded, restored, and re-upholstered furniture in the rented garage.

Upholstery equipment fills the 12 square meters cubicle to the brim. An extensive array of polyurethane foam and fabric rolls, nails, tools, and pieces of wood are meticulously placed along the walls of his garage.

The concrete is warm to the touch, but the shade in the garage passage, which separates the apartment building from the rest of the world, provides shelter from the sweltering sun. Drops from the AC unit above us trickle onto the ground at increasingly frequent intervals as if to signal that the heat is rising.

Currently, Rajić doesn’t have any commissions and uses the time to repair a drill, a green Bosch, “a good machine.” A steady whirring of a fan missing its front shield and music oozes from the radio inside his workshop.

He wears two glasses on top of each other, makeshift bifocals, and he barely takes his eyes away from the drill.

Rajić has been in the upholstery business for 50 years. He used to work for a private owner in the old part of Belgrade and started his own business out of the garage after he retired.

“This job is not something that has been passed down in generations,” he says from his worktable, “I learned this on my own accord.”

He is fond of the Blokovi neighborhood because it allows him to hang out with his friends living in the area when not tending to the pieces of his customers. “I have customers from all over Belgrade, not just from this area. And sometimes from out of town, too.”

As he doesn’t have any furniture to work on at the moment, he’s encouraged to demonstrate his upholstery skills on a piece of softwood for the camera. “Like this?” he asks. Behind his double sets of glasses, his eyes lock into mine. They reveal that he’s not convinced that demonstrating his craft on a 20-centimeter-long piece of wood is a fitting way to represent his lifelong work in the pages of history.

He goes back to repairing his drill.

Prints from Life in the New

View the price list for prints from my ‘Life in the New’ book project here.