Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
After Jugo Sarajevo, the life of a generation
www.afterjugo.com
Critical Report
“After Jugo” is a multimedia project that documents the life of the people born in the 80s in Sarajevo. They are now young adults, in their twenties, about to enter in the social, political and economical life of their country. They all have in common that they were young kids during the Bosnian war, 1992-1995. Some of them experienced the siege of Sarajevo and stayed into the city with their parents. Others managed to escape and came back years later. Some other moved recently to the city from the countryside, to study and to live the life of a big town. “After Jugo” is a website where photographs, video interviews and sound work together to portray the life of a generation. The stories of the people are as important as the photographs, if not more. With the images I tried to give a hint of how is life in Sarajevo today and to contextualize the subjects showing the environment where they live. The interviews, with the sound of the voice, make people real and help to involve the audience in their stories. Different reasons pushed me to choose this subject for the major project. Some personal and some more journalistic. While I recently travelled to the other countries in the Western Balkans, I never managed to get to the centre of the region and I felt something was missing. Sarajevo: the city where west and east meet, the Istanbul of the Balkans. A dear friend would take me round the cafés and bars insisting that there were no Serbs, Croats and Moslems here, only Sarajlije, as they are known in Serbo-Croat. It was difficult to disagree [..] Sarajevo, where East and West not only tolerated but thrived off each other’s cultural influence, was for me one of Europe’s greatest achievements. (p. 156-157, Glenny, 1992) In the late 80s, with my family, we used to go on holiday to Croatia and my father was working as photojournalist in the area. We went back only few years later, once the war was over. My father sometimes still tells me some episodes happened just before 1991, when he decided that being a war reporter was not for him. And if I know some of the history of the Balkans, it is more because the told me than because I read history books. I think, actually, that knowing its past it is fundamental for understanding a country and for this aim the book Bosnia: a short history by Noel Malcolm (2002) has been very useful. Moreover, one of the clearest memories I have from when I was a child is of a news piece on the Italian television: a reporter was meeting some youngsters in Sarajevo during the siege and walking in the city from a party to another. At a certain point, near a red car, one of the guys was shot by a sniper. Just few minutes before he was talking about music and girls and suddenly he was dead. I think that was the first time, although it was through the television, I realized what ‘death’ means. In some way, these are some personal reasons why I feel an interest towards the Balkans.
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
On the journalistic side, the fall of Yugoslavia (see Glenny, 1992, for an interesting reportage about the first years of the war) created seven countries in a process that lasted about 15 years and which actually is not yet defined: it is a unique event that has happened in the recent history of Europe. After the war ended, everybody in the West considered the conflict in the Balkans to be resolved. But this is not correct for places like Bosnia and Herzegovina. The break-up of a country brings changes and tensions that last for many years. And too often the mainstream media and the citizens of the neighbouring countries forget what happened and do not know how the society is recovering and how individuals are living. There are only some minor and dedicated information sources that tell what is happening in the area1, and although they only reach a niche of interested and focused people, these websites and blogs are a great source of information. They are constantly updated and written by people who live in the region and who understand better what is happening. What is left to the people after a country vanishes? What is their identity? How is life in a new-born country? What is the future of the new generations? I wanted to search the answers to these questions, that couldn’t easily be found on the news. Moreover, in 2010, it will be 15 years after the signing of the Dayton agreement that put an end to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. If it can not be considered a “real” anniversary, it is an important date. Bosnia is divided in two entities, the Bosnian-Croat Federation and the Rpublika Srpska, that are very independent from each other. In the past year, Milorad Dodik, the president of the Serb dominated state, started to call for independence and for splitting Bosnia and Herzegovina in two countries. There are many different feelings (Nuhefendić, 2009) about this, but every commentator seems to agree that a unilateral declaration of independence would lead to a new war. And some of them are already thinking and writing about how the international community should react to the creation of a new country in the South Eastern Europe: ‘People may die, and diplomatic isolation may follow. The choices the international community makes in the aftermath of these events will be critically important to the welfare of all the people of the region’ (Parish, 2009). Fifteen years ago, 20-year-old men took a gun to fight for their life. Today, people of the same age sit in the café of Sarajevo enjoying a typical Balkan calm. But what are their feelings? How is their life in a country that has many economical, political and social problems? Is their life really different from mine, considering that I am as well in my mid-twenties? I wanted to try to find some answers to these questions and to portray the life in a country that is physically close to us (at least it is in Europe) but not very well known. For example, it happened, before leaving for Sarajevo, that some friends looked at me surprised, as if I was going to an exotic and dangerous place. And I only answered that there was nothing strange and I was even going with my own car. I think just this episode can help to understand how little we know about what happens just outside our doorstep. So I decided that I wanted to meet some local people, talk to them, take photographs and show them to many people as possible, which is just about what a photojournalist has to do. While I was in Bosnia, I also realized that people need to talk, meet and interact to break the barriers that separate different groups and create prejudices: ‘it is always we and them [..] They don’t have opportunities to live together and to meet each other [..] and so you can hear about all these prejudices’ (Kuzmanović, 2009). Because of these reasons, I decided to address the project to the people who now are aged between 15 and 30 years old and who live in the Balkans and the neighbouring countries. 1
See for example “Osservatorio sui Balcani”, an Italian project born in 2000 to fill an information gap for those who work in the Balkan area dealing with peace building and co-operation issues. www.osservatoriobalcani.org See also “Balkan Insight”, created by the BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network) to “build and strengthen a dedicated, close-knit team of journalists across the Balkans, probing and analysing key transition issues and the process of European integration”. www.balkaninsight.com
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
I hope that “After Jugo” will be a starting point for people who want to know something more about Sarajevo and the Balkans in general, but also I hope that it will be seen by some Bosnians, Croats and Serbs at least to open a little crack in the mistrust that they often have towards each other. As many people told me while I was in Sarajevo2, youngsters just need to understand that they all have the same needs and same problems and therefore there is no reason to stay enclosed in their small group. These are also some of the reasons, which I will discuss in detail later, why I thought to present the project in the form of a website. Having decided to do a work about young people and for young people, the first step and ‘obstacle’ was to find my subjects. And not having being before in Sarajevo was not going to make my job easier. I decided I wanted to meet different people with different interests and background, and to be inclusive and more complete as possible. Before leaving I spoke with some Italian friends who had worked as volunteers in Bosnia and I found and contacted some NGOs working in Sarajevo with young people – as OIA (Youth Information Agency) and Caritas. Once arrived in the city I had to talk to people, explain what I was doing and get to know as many people as possible to be able to choose those who were more interesting and willing to talk and be photographed. It is then a chain that can be built by word of mouth: luckily Bosnians are friendly people and happy to sit down for a coffee and talk for hours. Each of my subjects has been photographed in a single situation, because each of them represents a specific character. An informal portrait and some environmental shots, together with the recorded voice, should form a kind of mosaic for each one. While I was in Sarajevo I realized that at the end I would have had nine people in the project, all of whom I can identify with a few words: -
Hazim, a Muslim student who moved to the city from a small town; Ivana, a Catholic student born in Sarajevo; Jasminko, a Muslim with a passion for writing and football; Velahavle, a music band; Ivona, a Serb girl who lost her father during the war; Deni, a young men involved in politics; Nedim, a graffiti painter; Azra, a Croat girl who recently moved to Sarajevo to work; Kemal, a Muslim student expression of the middle class, who escaped and lived in Italy during the war.
I would like to have been able to find also someone really religious, who studied in the Islamic school, to have a more religiously biased point of view to complete a bit more this mosaic of people. Other than these ‘characters’ I decided I would have talked to some external observers, that would have been able to give me some facts and figures. I organized some interviews with people working closely with young Bosnians, precisely from three different associations: -
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OIA (Youth Information Agency), that gives advices about volunteering, youth exchanges and makes surveys about the situation of youth in Bosnia; OGBIH (Education Builds Bosnia and Herzegovina), an association that gives scholarships to kids that were wounded or lost their parents during the war; Terca, a local NGO that deals with past and peace building issues.
Interview with Mersiha, from Education Builds BiH, http://www.afterjugo.com/audio/mersiha.htm And interview with Jan, director of the NGO OIA, http://www.afterjugo.com/video/ethnics_oia.htm
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
Because I wanted to make the project available to people that do not know Sarajevo I also decided to shoot some daily and night life scenes, to contextualize my subjects in their city. I went to Sarajevo already with the idea of making some video interviews, because the really important point is what people tell about their life. And, while it could have been easy to record the audio and then transcribe the interviews, I think that seeing the person while they speak makes them more real. I wanted to use the video as a talking photograph, that you can watch for a certain amount of time before moving to the next one. Along with that I had the idea of making a website with all the material I was gathering. When I got home, I had several video interviews, plus the photographs, some audio recordings and, of course, some handwritten notes. Sticking with the idea of a webpage seemed the most logical consequence to keep together all the information I had. Moreover, most of the people I interviewed have a Facebook account and all have internet access. Through a website I wanted to make the work available to them and also to have their feedback. Last but not least, Bosnia is famous for its diaspora: it is estimated that around 2 million people left the country because of the war and that at least one million is still dispersed around the world3. Internet was the perfect medium to reach all these people and their coetaneous living in other European countries. At this point I had three different blocks of information: people’s portraits (video plus photos); photos of the city and some audio recordings. From the beginning it was clear that I would have made a page for each character and a menu page to jump to each of them. The problem was how to put together this whith the rest of the work. Initially I thought to make two main sections, one about the people and one about the city. But in this way the website was poor, too simple and not interesting. I did not want to make a guide of Sarajevo along with a series of portraits. I found the solution thinking about Fig. by Broomberg and Chanarin (2007). In their book the authors link together a series of photographs that are connected in a chain. Each photograph introduce a subject which is taken again by the next one. And the strength of the work is not in each single photograph but it is in the whole book. If we rip off a page randomly the concept of that book falls apart. The links between each elements are “arbitrary, changeable and erratic” (Stallabrass in the introduction to Fig.), but they are constructed in a very intelligent way that gives sense to the book. Even if my body of work is not “conceptual” (as opposed to documentary by Stallabrass) it has a linear and sequential progression, or, to be more precise, the audience can choose to follow a sequence that I lined out. See below as it appears on the website:
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As stated by the Bosnian Institute in London [Internet] < http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosnia/viewMetatype.cfm?metatypeID=35> [Accessed 25 November, 2009]
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
The sequence The origin Ivona Patriotism Tunnel Kemal Bosnian politics Deni Mersiha Street cafés Nightlife Ivana Ivana's view Marko Bašciaršija Novi Grad Velahavle BBI Azra Kino Bosna Muezzin Cathedral Nationalism Nedim Facts and figures Hazim Dating a girl Prejudices Koševo stadium Jasminko Sarajevo Roses
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
The sequence begins with a photograph taken in 1987, in the decade when all the subjects were born, and it ends with a page that, even if visually represent something that had happened, looks towards the future and the possibility to build something new from the ashes of the past. Every page is connected to the previous one, either because it talks about the same person and subject or because is related to opposite of it (hence the passage from religion and nationalism to Nedim whose only interest is painting). Sometimes the link is not expressed, but I was interested in giving a personal path through the reportage, to explain step by step what I found in Sarajevo. This sequence also made easier to divide the pages into different thematic groups. In this way the visitors of the website can choose what they want to see without being forced and accordingly with what they already know about the subject. The main themes under which the pages are grouped are: -
Youth Sarajevo Politics Religion War Prejudices
These six sections all come from what the people say in the interviews and they help to give some context to the characters. A third way of exploring the website is possible: going directly to each character and listen to its interview or watch the photographs. From each page is then possible to start following the sequence or jumping to different subjects or other websites through hyperlinks. I am interesting in involving the viewer in the reportage: he can create his way through it and explore what he prefers. That is something peculiar of the internet and when working on a website we have to take advantage of it. O’Hagan (2009), referring to the last work by Jim Goldberg, says that ‘he deploys various formats to create a fragmented narrative’ and that the photographer ‘contextualize his portraits with street scenes and interiors’. This can easily done in a website. The narration becomes fragmented in the sense that many different pieces of a mosaic are put one next to the other to form a bigger picture: a portrait of a generation. The street scenes and interiors are joined by audio and video ‘to convey a sense of experience’ to the viewer (p. 24, McAdams, 2009), using all the possibilities that a multimedia piece offers. The audio, both ambient sounds and speech, it is a fundamental complements to the images and together they can tell a story that is not only visual but involves more senses. Ugo Volli, in an interesting essay, traces the role of the screen in contemporary art. When he comes to talk about the internet he talks about interaction: The television screen shows things that are really happening elsewhere and coordinated for a casual chain. [..] Next stop is the computer screen, which is no longer the receiver of a remote transmitter [..] (even if its receiver capacity swiftly returns thanks to the web). [..] There is an interaction between people through the screen [..] plus there is the person’s interaction with the screen. (p. 267, Volli, 2008)
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
I think that he touched the correct points: the internet is interaction and we have to make the best out of it. In “After Jugo” the viewer, other than choosing his way through the pages (interaction with the screen), can leave a comment in the blog section and can use the social networking tools that can be found at the bottom of the page to share – via Twitter, Facebook or Delicious – what they are reading or viewing or listening (interaction through the screen). To make the latter more prominent, I also set up a Facebook group4 where people can virtually meet. The characters of the website become once again more real and can invite their friends, creating a small community around the same focus and with a common interest. It is a nice and simple example of interaction or people through a screen. Doing so, the reportage is not concluded with the (virtual) publishing but “it stays alive”. Yet, the internet brings also other changes to how we approach a documentary piece. First of all the copy has to be short and slender, it is difficult to read long pieces of text on a screen. Something similar applies also to the videos. It is easier to watch a 2 minute clip than a long documentary movie. I think a good website should be like a mosaic that can be seen step by step, where each piece has its own story. The viewer should be able to move from one to another until he completes the whole piece of work. The simplification, the superficiality, the speed. (p. 32, Baricco, 2008) These three words exemplify the way how we learn and gather information in the 21st century. Baricco, in his essay, says that we now have a new formal model of movement. Being quick, jumping from one subject to another, like a spark. And, I would add, stopping only when we find something really interesting to deepen it, perhaps with a good book. Again, these concepts can apply also to the photography practice. To describe a bigger environment we can use a lot of photographs, albeit ordinary and descriptive. ‘The world is already full, saturated with images’ (p. 258, Boatto, 2008), therefore we have to give them a new importance through the creation of meaningful groups and with the combined use of other media, exactly like videos and audio recordings, or with strong pieces of text. The title of Boatto’s essay is ‘Making good use of the Banal’, if we substitute the word ‘banal’ with ‘ordinary’, it could be considered a contemporary way of working in the documentary practice. “Ordinary” photographs occur through the pages of After Jugo’s website. They are descriptive images that need to link two part of the narration and just give some plain information. See for example the tunnel, which is supported by an informative piece of text and hyper-links:
Butmir Tunnel5, Sarajevo 4 5
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=183294892187&ref=ts http://www.afterjugo.com/themes/tunnel.htm
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
It gives to viewer a piece of information and fits in the concepts that Boatto and Baricco are expressing. Although the image is simple, without it something would be missing. The tunnel’s image was not included in my first edit, but while I was lying out the sequence I decided to add it because I needed to fill a gap in the narration. Simple, plain and straightforward images, included in a bigger body of work as such, occur also in Broomberg and Chanarin’s work as Fig. and Ghetto, which strength, as I already mentioned above, lays in the cohesion of the photographs, their sequence and the text.
Ground Control, Star City military base, Russia. (p. 330-331, Broomberg and Chanarin, 2003) In my body of work, then, street photography has a role together with ambient sound6. In the same page I laid out a series of photographs and the audio recorded while passing next to the cafés of the city. Blurred, tilted, quickly shot photographs and decisive moments can describe better the lively pedestrian areas of Sarajevo where people walk continuously to reach their friends for a coffee. These two stylistics motifs, one plain and simple, the other quick and rough, are then also used to portray the subjects that I was going to interview. The environment where my characters live and act it is shot in a simple and straightforward style. The photographs do not leave much to the imagination but describe a place. Sometimes text (often taken from the interviews) is used to give some extra information. Moreover, the multimedia format allows a dynamic approach to documentary through the dense use of images, audio and text7, and especially a website allows also to refer to external sources in the internet. Whereas for the portraits of the people I had in mind the loose and dynamic style that characterize Leonie Purchas’ approach to this matter (Purchas, 2009).
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http://www.afterjugo.com/audio/street_bar.htm The sentence ‘The installation reflects his dynamic approach to documentary through dense displays of images, objects ad text’ has been used by the Photographers’ Gallery (London, 2009) to describe “Open See” by Jim Goldberg. http://www.photonet.org.uk/index.php?pxid=956 7
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London See for reference some photographs from different stories of the series “In the family8”:
I had also in mind some of the work done by Jessica Dimmock, for example the series about the paparazzi shot in Los Angeles (2009). Both authors are not worried by having their subject out of focus, blurred, showing odd expressions or body positions, but rather they want to show the real face of their characters in their normal and daily life. Showing a human being and his feelings through the image is more important than any technical issue that might happen whilst the photograph is taken. Referring to this, I did not want to direct my subjects and, although they were obviously aware of the presence of the camera, they just had to act normally. And I did not bother about those factors that could invalidate a portrait in the classical and traditional sense.
(Ivona, Hazim and Marko, from “After Jugo”, 2009) I think that to a certain extent I achieved what I was looking for. There are some single portraits of which I am really happy about (those above, among others). On the other hand for some subjects I think I only arrived nearly where I wanted. I believe the main cause of this it is the little time that some of them allowed me for taking pictures and that sometimes I was afraid of pushing towards a more intimate relationship. It would have been nice to have more time to spend with some of characters, but either they did not really wanted to or either I had to move on with the project. Looking for the right people has been time consuming and I needed half of the period I spent in Sarajevo to find them. After that, the other half was used to arrange meetings and interviews and to 8
http://www.leoniepurchas.com/home/portfolio/ [Accessed 26 November 2009]
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
begin to think about a structure for the project on the basis of what I was gathering little by little. For example, I interviewed some people but then I did not had the chance to meet them again to take photographs. One the causes for this it is that it was August and many people were going on holiday. For the same reason I could not meet anyone studying in the Islamic school, which was closed and so lessons were not taking place, when I went there to ask. Thus this is a piece that is missing in my mosaic. Sometimes I also feel that, somehow, I should have gone deeper into the lives of my subjects, either with the questions I was asking or taking more pictures. But my initial idea, that led to the structure of the website, was to ask general questions to have an idea of the average life of young people in Sarajevo, and I stacked to it. For example, I did not want to focus only on the past and the war, which could easily have been done with some of those subjects who had a really troubled childhood. The truth is that the problems of Bosnia and Herzegovina derive from what was left after the war, but the solution is to focus on the present and on the future. And I think I realized this on my website, which is not just a simple excuse to talk about the past once again, but rather wants to raise some questions about the future and the possibility to build something new. I am very happy about the structure of the project and the possibility to experience it using more than just the visual sense. I recently saw a photographic reportage about the same subject in an Italian magazine: a series of beautifully composed portraits and some quotations next to them. I believe this is not enough to describe a city or a country: even if the words are really powerful, the photographs lack on context, because they are just portraying one person each and nothing more. Using a multimedia device and multiple point of views (on the people and on the subject matter), a photojournalist or documentary photographer can, as I said before, convey a sense of experience to the viewers who then are engaged with the reportage and become active elements themselves.
Marco Pavan MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography LCC University of the Arts, London
Bibliography
1. Baricco, A. (2008) I barbari (The barbarians) Milano: Feltrinelli 2. Broomberg, A. and Chanarin, O. (2007) Fig., Gottingen: Steidl 3. Broomberg, A. and Chanarin, O. (2003) Ghetto, London: Trolley 4. Boatto, A. (2008) Making good use of the banal in Celant, G. and Maraniello, G. (2008) Vertigo, a century of multimedia art, from futurism to the web, Milano: Skira 5. Dimmock, J. (2009) Paparazzi! [Internet] VII Network. Available from <http://www.viiphoto.com/showstory.php?nID=1021> [Accessed 25 November 2009] 6. Glenny, M. (1992) The Fall of Yugoslavia, London: Penguin Books 7. Kuzmanović, J. (2009) Interview with the author, Sarajevo [Jelena Kuzmanović is the program coordinator of the NGO Terca, www.kucaprijatelja.org] 8. Malcolm, N. (2002) Bosnia, A short history, London: Pan Books 9. McAdams, M. (2009) Reporter’s Guide to Multimedia Proficiency [Internet] Teaching online journalism. Available from < http://mindymcadams.com/tojou/2009/now-printable-reportersguide-to-multimedia-proficiency/> [Accessed 25 November 2009] 10. Nuhefendić, A. (2009) Addio Bosnia, vado a Sarajevo (Goodbye Bosnia, I go to Sarajevo) [Internet] Osservatorio sui Balcani. Available from < http://www.osservatoriobalcani.org/article/articleview/11914/1/42 > [Accessed 25 November, 2009] 11. O’Hagan, S. (2009) Jim Goldberg: Open See [Internet] The Observer. Available from http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/01/jim-goldberg-open-see-review [Accessed 19 November, 2009] 12. Parish, M. (2009) Republika Srpska: after independence [Internet] Balkan Insight. Available from < http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/main/comment/23797/> [Accessed 23 November 2009] 13. Purchas, L. (2009) Leonie Purchas [Internet] Available from < http://www.leoniepurchas.com/> [Accessed 26 November 2009] 14. Volli, U. (2008) The screen – “General Equivalent” of contemporary art in Celant, G. and Maraniello, G. (2008) Vertigo, a century of multimedia art, from futurism to the web, Milano: Skira