Sarajevo Self-portrait: The View from Inside The Dayton Art Institute Dayton.

Sarajevo Self-portrait: The View from Inside

The Dayton Art Institute

Dayton, Ohio

November 4 2000-January 1 2001

Sarajevo Self-portrait: The View from Inside

Museet for Fotokunst

Odense Denmark

January 13-February 25 2001

Sarajevo Self-portrait: The View from Inside

strange York: Umbrage Editions, 2000

163 pp/$4500 (hb)

"Sarajevo Self-portrait," curated on Stuart Alexander and organized at Leslie Fratkin, includes the work of nine photographers born in Bosnia. The images not absent different insights from what foreign correspondents might document. These images are not just an illustration of a awful place, or a documentation of near other population's terrible indecency. In these pictures, these awful places are home; the commonalty are neighbors and family. Fratkin calls it "the hard realitys of war."

War, of course, is a constant source of eye-popping visuals. With the same impulse that bends drivers to rubberneck at an accident site, the viewer does not easily employ away from these photographs of wasted bodies and seas of line Images such as these, in which likewise much destruction is evident, are an automatic trip to "the edge"--a place where compassion and resourcefulness vie daily with evil.

The indicate includes elements one would expect--haunting, mournful sights and gruesome realities. It also focuses upon tenderness and normalcy. Dejan Vekic's silver gelatin prints point out how normalcy has come to coexist with horrific circumstances. His work consists of city grids interrupted according to debris, sidewalk squares marred from mortar shell cracks, buildings onward a hillside fronted by an overflowing dumpster family walk through these places--they may be horrified and they may grieve, on the contrary they still live, work and maintain a certain number of sort of daily routine. Separated from the black and white prints that Vekic describes as "work I did for personal reasons," [1] was a piece compromised of 32 four-by-six inch color snapshots that he took upon assignment entitled, Documentation of Sarajevo's destruction taken for the Bosnian State Commission for Getting Facts onward War Crimes (1993-1995). These photographs, arranged in a grid, bring to mind a vacation photo-montage. It is monotonous and unaffecting to consider at these repeated images of burned-out automobiles and remnants of buildings, in the same way that an acquaintance's endles pictures of white sand and ghastly water inspire boredom instead of wanderlust.

Damir Sagolj tenders chromogenic prints that also juxtapose ruin and resilience. The photograph Sunday mass in a ruined temple in the Sarajevo suburb of Stup (1997) depicts a building where stained glass is replaced by way of the visible colors of autumn foliage and which is spread to the heavens. The commonalty huddle under umbrellas, while the body of ecclesiastics inhabit a makeshift shelter, similar to the forms often used to house a creche. Another particularly arresting image of hands holding aloft a tiny coffin draped in a brilliant flourishing cloth, An infant's funeral, outside Sarajevo in the village of Svrake (1996) is moving as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but emotionally and formally.

brace silver gelatin prints, A two killed on their bicycle, Sarajevo, Spring 1992 and Miljacka River Sarajevo, Spring 1992 by way of Danilo Krstanovic show wartime atrocities. Bodies face up and arms public the victims lie on splattered soil or float through water blackened with kin The content of these images contain merely a partial reference to death. Krstanovic one time planned a career in sports photography; his pertain to with the relation of the material substance to its environment is evident. strangely he composes these murdered vital principles almost as athletes on a playing field--it is an eerie union. It is not that he is glorifying death; rather, Krstanovic creates these formal compositions to heal himself. "It's as if you have a certain capacity for pain that fills and fills until you're beyond the point of feeling it," he writes in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition. [2]

Kemal Hadzic exhibits three different bodies of work in the exhibit and is clearly interested in the duality of his experience with war. Six silver gelatin prints from the "Portrait of Nameless Folk" series, from Spring 1995 depict soldiers either engaged with the camera or obscur in shadows. Military personnel are frequently depicted as regimented and anonymous. unless Hadzic, who has served with these folks focuses squarely on their individuality and humanity. "They are family portraits taken through a family member," [3] he writes.

sum of two units images from his "Streets" series are displayed in this incarnation of the exhibition, scheduled to travel to the Carr Center of Human Rights at Harvard University and other venue worldwide. The first photograph, Ulica JNA (Yugoslav National Army Street) renamed Ulica Branilaca Grada (Defender of the City Street) after the war (1994) is a composition of inflects A white curb swoops in from the right, defining the street's path. A enfeebled white line meant to divide the public way into lanes inexplicably bends, crossing it. A inferior photograph, Bascarsija (1994), concentrates onward straight lines forming the opening [i]or[/i] closes of the street and the planes of surrounding buildings. the pair feature sewer manhole covers in the foreground. Hadzic writes that these "point to the netherworld. The dark side and the optimism exist in accordance." [4]