POSTWAR ALBUM
25 years after the siege, Spanish war reporter Gervasio Sánchez returns to Sarajevo, where he meets with adults he photographed as children. How did the war change their lives?
The Spanish war photographer Gervasio Sánchez documented the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s with scenes of barricaded streets, walls pockmarked by bullet holes, burnt-out cars, graves, the destroyed National Library. And in their midst people going about their daily lives while fighting or mourning their dead. Children turn up again and again in his pictures of the battered city, on playgrounds, in back courtyards or playing amidst car wrecks. Gervasio kept in touch with some of them and met other subjects from his photos for the first time on a trip back to Sarajevo 25 years after the end of the siege – and showed them the pictures he took back then. What became of them? What was it like growing up after the war? Some of them are overwhelmed when they see the images because they have no photos of their own from that time. The aesthetic of Gervasio’s almost poetically framed black-and-white scenes stands in stark contrast to the brutal motifs they sometimes depict. It’s the same with memories: our protagonists bring the photos back to life with their stories, and we witness people who were hit hard by the war and yet look back on their childhood with nostalgia and affection.