I first visited and photographed Sarajevo in 1996. I had been volunteering in neighbouring Croatia and managed to hitch a trip in to Bosnia in a UN car. The conflict and siege had ended a couple of months earlier than and the town was having fun with its long-awaited peace. Sarajevans took to its scarred streets in large numbers, assembly with mates and consuming espresso protected within the information that they wouldn’t be struck down by a sniper or shell.
The destruction of the town at the moment was jaw-dropping, surreal and seemingly complete: rows upon rows of damaged, bombed-out high-rise flats; shell craters and explosion indents in every single place; hospitals, workplaces and factories all in ruins. This was urbicide, a late-Twentieth-century Dresden or Stalingrad. Everybody who lived by means of the practically four-year siege had a nightmare to share.
I returned to the town the next yr and arrange a photograph venture for kids: the Sarajevo Digital camera Children. Utilizing donated gear from again residence in Scotland, I arrange a makeshift darkroom and organised picture lessons within the basement of an orphanage. I developed a considerably unhealthy obsession with Sarajevo and all issues Bosnian, and volunteered with the children’ picture venture for 3 consecutive summers.
The Sarajevo Digital camera Children led to lifelong friendships and connections with the scholars and with the town of Sarajevo. I'd return there and to the broader Balkans over the subsequent few years to doc the peace and the reconstruction – which finally culminated in my ebook and exhibition A Balkan Journey.
This photograph was taken in Sarajevo on 21 November 2015, 20 years to the day after the Dayton peace settlement was signed, signalling the tip of practically 4 years of brutal wars in Bosnia and Croatia and bringing concerning the finish of the siege of Sarajevo – the longest metropolis siege in trendy historical past.
Sarajevo had modified dramatically since 1996, after I took images of a metropolis in black and white, destroyed however surviving. The town now placed on a courageous, daring, cosmopolitan face; a contemporary European vacationer vacation spot like another. An abundance of recent procuring centres ran the size of the previous Sniper Alley – the principle thoroughfare main into the guts of the town – and the Sarajevo that the Digital camera Children documented now not existed. However the divisions had been nonetheless endemic.
For the Twentieth anniversary of peace, I needed to doc the tales of younger individuals of their late teenagers and early 20s, who had been born throughout or simply after the battle and so had no actual reminiscence of the conflict. I needed to seek out out what, if something, the Dayton settlement and peace in Bosnia had meant to them at a time when reminiscences of the conflict had been nonetheless uncooked and the ethnonationalist leaders had been nonetheless in energy and driving the divisions.
The unhappy actuality is that younger individuals in Bosnia nonetheless have separate schooling methods that work to copy the divisions, with both sides imposing its personal historic perspective and political ideology. It leaves little scope for actual integration. I met and photographed younger individuals from either side – Bosnian Muslims and younger Bosnian Serb college students in Sarajevo. Each teams of younger individuals spoke of wanting to interrupt away from the fixed speak of conflict and distrust of the “different” – they simply needed to have a future in their very own nation. Uninterested in the nationalism and warlike rhetoric, these younger individuals had been a part of a rising quantity who argue that it was by no means their conflict and that they need to not have to hold its weight, nor have it drag them and their nation down.
As the sunshine started to fade on the anniversary day, I rushed to the well-known Žuta Tabuja viewpoint wanting over the town to get some last-minute panorama pictures. I didn’t know who the couple had been in my body, they had been simply strangers blocking my view. However as they reached out and embraced one another it turned a photograph price capturing. It appeared the proper poster picture to focus on Bosnia and Sarajevo 20 years on from conflict: an optimistic picture representing all of the younger individuals I had photographed and spoken to earlier who longed for peace and alternatives of their nation – of their Sarajevo, a metropolis that had seen and suffered a lot.
Chris Leslie’s CV
Born: Glasgow, 1974.
Skilled: MA (Distinction) in documentary images, London Faculty of Communication.
Influences: “Tom Stoddart, Alfredo Jarr, Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg.”
Excessive level: “Launching my new ebook in Sarajevo in November 2021.”
Low level: “By accident destroying my first 4 rolls of BW movie from A Balkan Journey.”
Prime tip: “Take time to see, discover, stroll, take up with no digital camera.”
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