Aleksandar Bojko was the only citizen of Banja Luka who, during his more than half a century of long artistic creation - from the beginning of the second to the middle of the seventh decade of the 20th century - tried his hand in all three then available visual media: painting, photography and film.
He was born on April 7, 1896 in Foča. His family moved to Banja Luka in 1908, and only a year later Bojko received a camera from his father, which he carried through the most turbulent part of his life and used it to take about a hundred shots on glass photo plates in the First World War. He was an academic painter by profession, and he was educated in Venice, Vienna and Belgrade. In the early thirties of the last century, he began to exhibit his works of art, and his specialties were still lifes and landscapes. He taught painting at the Teachers' and Higher Pedagogical School, and the Gymnasium in Banja Luka.
In addition to painting, he regularly recorded the world around him on glass plates and celluloid with his camera, classifying the photographs into several cycles: "Cities and Landscapes of BiH", "Monuments of Ottoman Culture", "Personalities",… He left behind an imposing an opus of about 1,500 photographs and photo-negatives, of inestimable cultural-historical, ethnographic and ethnological significance.
Aleksandar Bojko was also one of the pioneers of amateur film in Banja Luka. In the period from 1938 to 1963, he shot about three hours of moving pictures, which represent an extremely valuable film archive about life in the pre-war, war and post-war city on the banks of the Vrbas. The real pearls in the series of his documentaries are the war chronicle of occupied Banja Luka called "Banja Luka in the war" (1941-1945) and the two-part "Bosnia that passed" (1939-1963), in which Bojko is on a celluloid tape eight millimeters wide. forever imprinted the architecture, life and customs of a time, long gone.
During his life, this versatile artist tried his hand as an (episodic) actor in the film "Blacksmith of the Crucifix" (1919), directed by Heinz Hanus, he was an avid fan of motorcycles, and owned one of the richest collections of butterflies in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia… He passed away 2. August 1969 in Banja Luka…
