Product Details
Paperback
207 pages
Channel Photographics LLC
Published 2005
From Publishers Weekly
If not completely forgotten after more than a decade, the horrors of the Bosnian war have been crowded out by new horrors in new places. But while the attention of the rest of the world has moved on, Bosnia's people have been left with the task of not only rebuilding a nation from scratch but also of coming to terms with the war's legacy—the identification of the dead and the search for justice. For its Muslims, reconstruction has also meant relearning how to live among, and trust, a population that tried to erase them out of existence. Terry's camera documents this grim story's human aspect with rich detail. In lush, vividly colored and carefully composed images (that nonetheless avoid prettification), Terry assembles a panorama of a society coming to terms with overwhelming trauma. The subjects range from the blurred face of a schoolgirl giggling on a bus, to a pair of melancholy wheelchair-bound basketball players who were crippled during the war, to the stomach-turning process of identifying the dead. One quietly devastating image shows a forensic anthropologist collapsed into a chair in 2000, exhausted from cleaning the corpse of someone who was "ethnically cleansed" in 1992. Despite such dark images, what emerges most strongly from the collection is the sense that "life goes on no matter what, for better or for worse," as Lawrence Weschler notes in his afterword. By showing us this persistence, Terry's book reaffirms photography's crucial role as witness and spur to conscience. (Oct.)
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Book Description
Explores the human costs and consequences of war in Bosnia, with photographs that illuminate the promises and contradictions of this post-war society. Marked by ethnic cleansing and the worst genocide since World War II, Bosnia has been quiet since the tanks rolled out and the journalists went home. The country is still deep in the throes of rebuilding a civil society, and this book pays witness to the process:
*the exhumation and identification of approximately 20,000 victims of ethnic cleansing
*the widows of Srebrenica, who lost more than 7,000 men to the July 1995 massacre by Serbs
*refugee families who return to rebuild homes and villages destroyed in the war
*the youth of Sarajevo
*and the Bosnians who bear scars of war, including the 3K Sarajevo wheelchair basketball team. AUTHORBIO: Sara Terry was a staff writer at the Christian Science Monitor for ten years. Her work has also appeared in the NYT Magazine, Rolling Stone, and the Boston Globe. She is a 2005 recipient of the Alicia Patterson Fellowship for her reportage on Bosnia.
Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for The New Yorker for over 20 years, has written about political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, and of a Lannan Literary Award. The author of eleven books, including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder and Vermeer in Bosnia, he has taught at Princeton, Columbia, Bard, and the UCSC He currently serves as the director of the NY Institute for the Humanities at NYU. |
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