Abstract
During and after the wars in ex-Yugoslavia, Bosnia was a laboratory for new photographic approaches to war, violence and civilian suffering. Among these approaches, Fred Ritchin and Gilles Peress’s online photo essay, Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace (1996), emphasized interpretive openness, plurality of meaning, narrative non-linearity and audience interaction, thus redefining as merits what photojournalism had formerly regarded as liabilities. The project convincingly represented the ongoing conflict’s multilayeredness and the vicissitudes of the transition to peace: on a day-to-day level, ambivalence ruled and alliances shifted; chaos, confusion and unpredictability prevailed. The project’s users experience the conflict’s messiness through the website’s overall organization which inhibits easy orientation, thus reproducing the conflict’s disorder. In the grids, in particular, non-sequitur panel-to-panel transitions illustrate the conflict’s lack of sense as it is traditionally understood. The project is an important precursor to current war photography, aiming to acknowledge the messiness of violent conflict rather than reducing it to simple but misleading narratives.
Introduction
During and after the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia and Herzegovina served as a laboratory for new photojournalistic approaches to war, genocide and overall violence including mass civilian suffering. These new approaches were inspired by recognition of the ineffectiveness of traditional photojournalistic work for ending the violence despite its success in raising international awareness and producing memorable photographs. Ex-Yugoslavia revealed the simplicity of the conventional linkage between photographic documentation, awareness-raising and political responses that had informed photojournalism since its inception and helped establish it as a photographic genre. As a result, photographers began reformulating their works’ purpose and practice, not only in Bosnia but elsewhere too.
Forensic photography recognized that, if photography cannot stop violence, then at least it can try to contribute to justice after violence. Participatory photography regarded photography as a democratizing and emancipatory process through which participants became agents of their own image. Post-conflict and peace photography engaged the limits of representation inherent in conventional war photography focusing on destruction and human suffering, and developed forward-looking perspectives. Aftermath photography visually emphasized the continuation of violence as traumatic memories, locating these memories in landscapes, abandoned buildings and material objects. Some of these approaches (especially aftermath and forensic photography) have received much attention both at the time and afterwards while others, such as post-conflict or even peace narratives, found recognition primarily in specialized discourses.
In this article, we want to engage with Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, 1 an online project designed and realized by Fred Ritchin, Gilles Peress and The New York Times on the web in summer 1996. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize 2 in the following year, the project was one of the most innovative attempts at the time to explore new forms of reporting on peace and conflict in the context of Bosnia, engaging digital media’s interactive and multimodal possibilities. We review the project’s basic ideas and their transformation into an online project, analyse the project’s strengths and weaknesses, and tentatively sketch its continuing relevance in today’s visual and media environment which is much more dominated by inter-activity and digitization than it was at that time. The project’s title – Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace – is certainly as relevant today as it was in 1996, given the fragility of the peace process (Bennett, 2016), the institutionalization of uncertainty in Bosnia over the last 25 years (Rhotert and Rolofs, 2020), current threats to both the formal–institutional arrangements agreed upon in the Dayton Accords and Bosnia’s territorial integrity, 3 and the continuing discussion of photography’s purpose, politics and overall relevance in (post-)conflict settings.
By redefining as merits what photojournalism had often regarded as liabilities – interpretive openness, plurality of meaning, narrative non-linearity and audience interaction – the Ritchin–Peress project compellingly represents the conflict’s messiness, its multilayeredness and the vicissitudes of the transition to peace. Even in a conflict, the overall dimensions of which invited a simple binary reading, on the day-to-day level, things got murky: ambivalence ruled and alliances shifted; chaos and confusion dominated; and unpredictability and disorder prevailed. In this article, we elaborate on how Ritchin and Peress addressed the shortcomings of photojournalism and utilized the rapidly changing media environment characterized by digitization and audience interaction to communicate to their readers the conflict’s messiness rather than reducing it to a straightforward but ultimately misleading story. We show that the project’s users get involved in the conflict’s messiness through the website’s organization, especially in the grids where non-sequitur panel-to-panel transitions illustrate the absence of sense, traditionally understood, from the conflict. As such, Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace is an important precursor to current war and conflict photography which can fully capitalize on digitization and audience interaction to better understand the messiness of violent conflict in such places as Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.
New photographies in Bosnia: Responding to the crisis of photojournalism
When Ritchin and Peress launched their project, photojournalism and documentary photography had been ‘at the dock’ for some time (Solomon-Godeau, 1991; see also Rosler, 2006; Sontag, 1979). Critics accused photographers of contributing to violence rather than merely documenting it; exploiting the subjects depicted, especially those in pain; making human suffering appear beautiful and, by doing so, aestheticizing and depoliticizing pain; and producing, as visiting photographers, ad hoc images without deeper knowledge of the structural, political and historical conditions on location. Claims to objectivity and neutrality were increasingly scrutinized from critical perspectives emphasizing the role photographers themselves played in the construction of what they were documenting, thus challenging the very idea of detached, objective documentation.
Furthermore, the wars in ex-Yugoslavia also made abundantly clear that photojournalism could not stop violence; it helped raise international awareness but not much more. Regarding the siege of Sarajevo (from April 1992 to February 1996), photographer Paul Lowe (2015: 5) explains that, at its beginning: like the citizens of Sarajevo, many of us in the media believed that, if we told the story loudly enough that one side was clearly the aggressor and the other the victim, that the world would take notice and intervention to stop the carnage would ensue.
The world did take notice but intervention did not follow. Ron Haviv’s (2020a) comments exemplify the resulting frustration on the part of photographers and other media people. After the timely publication of photographs he had taken in Bijeljina documenting ‘[Serbian] paramilitaries executing unarmed Muslim civilians and taking prisoner of a young male civilian, who was later found dead’ (p. 185), Haviv thought ‘these photographs would provide a final push, so the world would stop this. But obviously nothing happened. It was really incredibly disappointing’ (quoted in Lowe, 2014: 218). Many photographers translated this disappointment into a constructive search for new approaches to photojournalism, some of which we will briefly sketch to position the Ritchin–Peress project within the emerging photographies of the time. The typology is rough, characterized as much by differences between the various approaches as by overlap and similarities, both aesthetically and politically. As always, some photographic work defies categorization.
Forensic photography
If photography cannot stop violence, then it may contribute to justice after violence by systematically documenting atrocities and re-appearing the disappeared (Sánchez, 2011). Forensic photography, without denying the photographer’s agency, is often based on a positivist understanding of images as evidence and photographers/artists as evidence collectors. In the Bosnian context, the work of Peress and Ziyah Gafić exemplifies two variations of forensic photography. Peress’s forensic work (Stover and Peress, 1998) focuses on the exhumation of mass graves while Gafić’s approach – photography, memory and identity work, forensics – documents personal effects of victims of the Srebrenica genocide, collected from the bodies after exhumation from mass graves (Gafić, 2015). For Gafić, ‘these items are the last resort of identity, the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed’. 4
Aftermath photography
Aftermath photography acknowledges a given conflict’s continuation in what seem to be post-conflict conditions, thus visually interrogating the post in post-conflict (Baker and Mavlian, 2014). Focusing on the visualization of traumatic memories and the destruction inflicted upon landscapes and built environment, it cultivates slow photography and ‘elegiac and mournful modes’ of representation, replacing ‘the notion of the photograph as an act of interruption, displacement, interrogation, rearticulation’ with that of photography ‘as a site of “glacial” contemplation’ (Roberts, 2014: 110). Capa’s famous demand that a photographer must be close to action is ridiculed by the absence from aftermath photography of anything resembling action, and photojournalism’s self-understanding in terms of documentation and evidence is replaced with emphasis on ambiguities and interpretive openness (Lisle, 2011). In regard to Bosnia, Simon Norfolk’s aftermath photographs are said to be ‘meditations on the ethics of response and responsibility’ (Danchev, 2009: 42) on the part of the photographer and the viewer. Research-based and produced with considerable temporal distance, Norfolk’s work challenges simplified notions of temporal linearity and time’s progressiveness as well as the very notion of ‘past’. However, different aftermath photographers (and commentators), while jointly criticizing the conventions of photojournalism, pursue different visual agendas and some move beyond the aftermath in search of (representations of) peace (see Möller, 2017; Terry and Van der Heijden, 2018).
Post-conflict and peace photography
Post-conflict and peace photography acknowledges, and tries to visualize, the constructive potentialities inherent in social conflict. Theoretically, post-conflict photography can be differentiated from peace photography in that the former, following the photojournalistic tradition, merely documents post-conflict conditions while the latter, reflecting the tradition of socially concerned photography, normatively aims to contribute to peace pro-actively (Allan, 2011; Möller, 2019; Ritchin, 2013: 122–141). In photographic practice, such differentiation often collapses. Rather than limiting peace to ‘an ephemeral space between wars’ (Knight, 2020: 9), peace photography understands peace as a photographic subject in its own right and ‘shapes and diversifies viewers’ understandings of peace beyond established and taken-for-granted ones’ (Möller, 2020). It enables viewers to look for peace in unusual places – activism, aid and advocacy (see Allan, 2011; Sliwinski, 2011; Walsh, 2019: section 3) – but also in everyday activities in post-conflict societies. This is important in Bosnia where peace, conventionally understood, appears paralysed (see Bennett, 2016) and under threat. Thus, Haviv asks (in Walsh, 2019: ch. 6): ‘What are the visual narratives of peacetime? It’s important not just to focus on the conflicts, but to raise awareness about post-conflict society and to examine when and how peace plays out and where, in cases, it fails.’ His interest in potential ‘uses [of] memory to move past the loss and create one nation for all Bosnians’ (Haviv, 2020b: 211) is important in a society apparently characterized by the opposite. Engaging with the temporality of the aftermath, Rineke Dijkstra’s work ‘Almerisa’ is a good example of peace photography in the Bosnian context, exemplifying the process of an individual’s adaptation to a more peaceful environment after moving from war-torn Bosnia to the Netherlands without implying that such adaption were possible only outside Bosnia. 5
Participatory photography
Participatory photography aims at post-conflict community building through citizens’ participation in photographic projects. Often ascribed a democratizing role, participation in such projects is regarded as equally important as the final product. Participatory photography breaks with the tradition of some taking pictures of others; it is repeatedly framed as ‘giving voice’ to individuals that are commonly unheard or even silenced by powerful forces. It enables participants to become agents of their own image, representing themselves as they want to be seen by others rather than being represented by others in terms other than their own, e.g. as victims. Exploring participatory projects in Bosnia – projects organized by the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo: Reconciliations) and the Post Conflict Research Centre (Balkans Diskurs Youth Correspondents Programme, BDYCP) – Tiffany Fairey and Rachel Kerr (2020) emphasize certain best practices while also acknowledging limitations and restrictions. 6 They understand the emergence of photographic voices from such projects not in terms of authenticity but, rather, as ‘a negotiated, uncertain and emergent practice’ (Fairey, 2018: 112): there is ‘a range of stories and perspectives that are considered and edited according to a particular strategic aim embedded within a particular set of power relations’ (p. 121). Participatory photography thus points towards photography’s ‘plurality and its open-ended capacity for re-invention and re-appropriation’ (p. 121).
Bosnia: Uncertain paths to peace
The context
With Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, Ritchin and Peress addressed and completely re-formulated one component of photographic work that the above photographies often treat quite conventionally: the relationship between photographers and viewers. By so doing, they challenged the authorial voice, invited audience participation in an original manner, prescient of current internet-based media work, and engaged with questions pertaining to objectivity, neutrality and documentation that are fundamental to photojournalistic practice. As we, the authors of this article, are viewers, too, actively interacting with the project, we wish to share with our readers our reading/viewing experience of Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace. Before doing so, we will briefly review the media environment within which the project operated and which it aimed to modify, taking full advantage of the – still limited – possibilities offered by digitization.
At the time, photo editors ‘represent[ed] a medium which [was] almost everywhere considered secondary to the text’ (Ritchin, 1999: 99), often limited to ‘editorial photography’ illustrating ‘preexisting ideas’ (p. 26). While some authors argued that image and text could be connected with one another in a mutually supportive manner, thus maximizing the overall effect (Gilgen, 2003: 56), others disentangled text from image, arguing that, rather than telling the same story differently, image and text always tell different stories (MacDougall, 1998: 257). Overall, the media scene was dominated by double scepticism – scepticism about images’ capability to tell a story unaided by language, and scepticism about the audience’s capability of identifying the intended story (see p. 68). However, many photographers, including Peress, were indeed aware of the subjectivity and story-telling potentialities of images. Peress, born 1946, was already at that time an internationally acclaimed photographer, well known for both his work in, for example, Rwanda (Peress, 1995; see also Cieplak, 2017: 62–73) and Iran (Peress, 1997; see also Linfield, 2010: 238–242) and his approach to photography, going beyond the documentary and authenticating role assigned to photography in many media contexts. In addition to Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, Peress also produced three monographs on the wars in ex-Yugoslavia (see Linfield, 2010: 242–245; Lowe, 2014: 220–223).
The conventional priority assigned to text rather than image reflects Western culture’s rather schizophrenic fascination by and fear of visual culture; photographed images in particular are deemed more ‘treacherous’ and easier to manipulate than language (see Sontag, 1979: 4). ‘The photograph . . . draws the viewer into an interpretive relationship that bypasses professional mediation’ (MacDougall 1998: 68) but few professional mediators were interested in such bypassing. Only a few practitioners acknowledged that there is something inherently elusive in images that, while it cannot be adequately grasped by means of language, constitutes (a part of) the – often intangible – power of visual representations (Reinhardt, 2007: 25). Fewer still appreciated and tried to capitalize on elusiveness, inviting what Ritchin (1999: 101), discussing Peress’s Iran photography, calls ‘an open-ended, non-authoritative dialectic’ among photographers, audiences and images. Ritchin and Peress deemed digitization an inevitable development, bound to change the nature of photojournalism and the role of editors, photographers and spectators, with people formerly known as ‘the subjects depicted’ increasingly becoming themselves image producers – a process that later culminated in citizen journalism, citizen photography and the ever-increasing dissemination of visual images through social media channels.
Contents, purpose and structure
Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace epitomizes uneasiness regarding the state of photojournalism and outlines photojournalistic paths to the digital future – a future characterized by an increase in audience interaction and interpretive openness regarding the meanings of any given image. Photojournalism had from the beginning tried to tell compelling stories, but responsibility had been attributed to editors and photographers. In contrast, Ritchin and Peress assigned an unusual degree of responsibility to the audience: one of the project’s main elements was the transformation of the (mainly passive, receptive) audience into inter-actors actively engaging with the project’s material and constructing their own narratives which may, or may not, coincide with the project’s creators’ preferred narrative. The project aimed ‘to take advantage of the new strategies made possible by the Web – nonlinear narratives, discussion groups, contextualizing information, panoramic imaging, the photographer’s reflective voice’ (Ritchin, 2009: 102). Therefore, Ritchin and Peress are curators 7 rather than (only) authors/producers of images, providing a space for active interaction among them, the materials and the inter-actors.
Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace presents texts and images revolving around two locations in Sarajevo, the (Serb-dominated) suburbs and the (Bosniak-dominated) Old Town, referenced as The Suburbs and Sarajevo, respectively. The project’s purpose was to describe in text and image ‘the tentative making of peace’ (p. 102), its ‘problematic and possibility’ (p. 105): ‘We were attempting to ask how people who viciously killed one another for years might live together, and provided forums for readers to discuss strategies for resolution’ (p. 105). To this end, 14 forums were established, 8 presenting a major component of the website’s interactivity. 9 Readers were encouraged to actively participate in the project by submitting comments so as to enable ‘a conversation among photographer, subject, and reader’ (p. 106). Such a procedure challenged the authority of both the photographer and The New York Times to establish what really happened in Bosnia. Videos and audios provided additional information and impressions in the same way as a summary of the Dayton Peace Accords, maps, a glossary, a chronology and a list for further reading, among other things. Plans to nudge readers into reflection upon their navigational choices by manipulating their journeys through the website had to be abandoned. 10
Inspired by current political developments in Bosnia, we visited Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace for the first time in spring 2021. Re-visiting a project which was established during a specific period and was therefore embedded in a particular digital media environment is challenging: our user experience reflects our digital socialization – as users and researchers – during the past 25 years since the website’s publication. Thus, our personal experience with the website and its effects on us certainly differ from those the original users had back in the 1990s, about which we do not speculate. Launched today, such a project would certainly have a very different character, including improved design features to support access via smartphones and to facilitate user habits established in the past decades of digital practice. 11
The front page is kept in black, displaying one photograph prominently at the centre. We can only click directly on the picture or on a text below the image – ‘Continue into Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace’ – which is kept in a bright yellow, yet small, font. If we click on the picture, an introductory page appears, giving some background information on the project. Only a few hyperlinks are provided. Again, in a smaller yellow font, three options are available:
Continue to the Photo Essay
About the Navigation
A Complete Guide to the Site
Used to highly self-explanatory user interfaces, we are tempted to go directly into the essay without bothering to familiarize ourselves with the navigation. We consider ourselves experienced and knowledgeable users of digital interfaces. How could such a simple design possibly confuse us? Now only two options appear: we can either go To The Suburbs or To Sarajevo.
The website seems both simplistic and confusing at the same time. On the one hand, it has an overly simplified user interface. Merely six buttons are constantly available, MORE only sometimes: INDEX | GRID — CONTEXT | FORUMS — PREVIOUS | MORE | NEXT. However, clicking on images brings us to another page with more images and written texts. Without having read the navigation instructions, a feeling of being overwhelmed emerges. What do we have to click to experience the ‘whole’ story in the ‘correct’ order? How do we avoid missing a part? Can we click PREVIOUS and choose a different image to see the other photographs, to read other written texts? Moreover, audio files are integrated into some of the pages, adding an unusual multisensory element to the website, allowing us to listen to the photographer’s personal (and rather philosophical) reflections on, for example, the world of the sniper [peress.2.an]. This world is rather unfamiliar to us (and interesting as it seems to reveal something about the lived reality in a city under siege).
Listening to the photographer talk about his ‘wish to be corrected by people who lived there’ and his understanding of the internet as ‘one of the places where my misconceptions will be corrected’ [peress.3.an] undermines our belief in and our reliance on the photographer’s authority. After all, he was on location, in contrast to us. Shouldn’t he be able to give us an authoritative reading of what happened and what his photographs were meant to express? Is this not what we expect photographs and photographers in a journalistic context to give us? What is the use of photography if it requires corrections of a given photographer’s misconceptions? Still, Peress’s voice sucks us into his story and his understanding of his own role as a photographer, visiting a location without being of/from this location, a guest, a stranger, uninvited. Furthermore, his reflections, acknowledging his own limitations, make us think about the role assigned to us, as users who did not live ‘there’ during the siege. We understand that this project will not give us the assurance we expected it to give us when we started our navigation.
Theoretically, we are aware of the gap between ‘the little a photograph reveals and all that it promises to reveal but cannot’ (Hirsch, 1997: 119) but only seldom do photojournalists explicitly acknowledge the epistemological limits of their work, thus undermining their own authority. Theoretically, we are also aware of the ‘excess meaning’, the hidden, ‘unintended sites of connotation’ (MacDougall, 1998: 68) that images always carry with them; we wonder if a photograph reveals less than it promises to reveal or, perhaps, more because we might discover something not even the photographer was aware of. And, we wonder, how are the ‘people who lived there’ supposed to ‘correct’ the photographer’s conception? How are users who did not live there supposed to navigate the plurality of views bound to result from such correction? Will such correction not result in viewers’ confusion? And does it make sense in the first place to expect anyone to be capable of providing a ‘correct’ conception if by correct we mean a conception that is relevant beyond first-person assumptions, no matter how convincing and justified such assumptions might be in light of personal experience? We realize that, although we are only at the beginning of the project, we are already drawn into its dynamics.
The images presented on the website frequently appear very small, details are hard to discover. This does not facilitate our orientation either. Again, we are confused: has it not been one of the purposes of photography since its inception to ‘present things that could otherwise barely be described’ (Elkins, 2011: 149), to facilitate the viewing experience? Is the main purpose of this photography, then, to make us aware of how little we know about Bosnia and how little photography can do to fill the gaps in our knowledge? The images’ smallness may frustrate a reader who might just move to the next image hoping that this image will be clearer. Alternatively, however, readers may try to conquer the obstacle that the images’ smallness presents: ‘obstacles encourage the desire to conquer them’ (Van Alphen, 2005: 92) and function as a ‘means by which the space of representation is explored, challenged, and exposed’ (p. 73). It is a photographic balancing act – avoiding frustration on the part of the viewer resulting from the images’ limited scale while capitalizing on it so as to motivate the viewer’s interest in and desire of knowing more.
This is obvious in the grids: 7 x 5 photographs (
The grids: Approaching a plethora of narratives
What happens, then, when we visit the grids first – either the SUBURBS GRID or the SARAJEVO GRID as there is no grid combining both sets of images – and construct our own pathway through the images? As inter-actors, we are entitled to our own path through the grids, creating our own narrative. Such a pathway would seem to be unaided by the curators; our eyes can move freely from one image to any other image in the grid. However, the curators’ invisible hand would guide us into certain pathways, both by the grids’ overall organization and by our own reading experience in Western culture, expecting the narrative to commence in the grids’ left upper corner and then to progress from left to right and from the top to the grids’ bottom. Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, while exploring new photojournalistic territory, cannot deny the tradition from which it stems; likewise, inter-actors, while aiming to explore this new territory, will find it difficult to deny or escape entirely from their own reading experience and visual socializations.
We want to explore the grids-first approach through the operating procedures of sequential art as elaborated in the literature. We add theoretical thoughts to our personal reflections, assuming that inter-actors are not empty vessels: they are always influenced by the conceptual and theoretical baggage they carry with them which helps them process and structure their perceptions while simultaneously limiting them. Inter-acting is always a combination of personal reflection and learned knowledge: learned knowledge applied to or corrected in light of personal experience.
Rather than joining the narrative by clicking on an image, we could, for example, enter the project by exploring the visual narrative(s) contained in individual images. Their small size would make such an approach difficult but not impossible: we would see some things and miss others. Similar to the operation of sequential art, such as comics or traditional photo-essays devoid of text, the grid structure invites us to connect individual panels with each other so as to ‘mentally construct a continuous, unified reality’ (McCloud, 1993: 67) 12 or coherent narrative, the existence of which we presuppose even if we are exposed to non-sequitur panel-to-panel sequences where there is ‘no logical relationship between panels whatsoever’ (p. 72). Readers, as inter-actors, transform, by means of imagination, experience and pictorial memory, ‘separate images . . . into a single idea’ (p. 66). The question, then, is: whose idea is it – the curators’ or the reader’s?
In illustrated books, the construction of meaning unfolds in the small space between words and drawings where there ‘are established all the relations of designation, nomination, description, classification’ (Foucault, 1983: 28). In panel-to-panel sequences, these relations get established in the gutter: the space between the panels (or the spaces between different images in the same panel, as is the case in one of the images in the SAREJEVO grid where four individual photographs are both combined with and separated from one another). It is here that the inter-actors decide on the idea they want the images to illustrate, the meaning they want the panels to communicate. The gutter is a crucial inter-active device triggering imagination (see McCloud, 1993: 66). Thus, the grid cannot take the reader anywhere the reader does not want to go (p. 93).
But where do readers want to go? In Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace, the distance they must bridge from one panel to the next can be considerable; connections between neighbouring panels are not always obvious beyond their coexistence in time and space. Or they may be obvious to the curators based on the knowledge they brought with them to the design process but not to the reader who is lacking such knowledge. To discover connections, some knowledge would help – knowledge that is not always contained in or produced by the images. Conversely, the designers may deliberately present non-sequiturs precisely because they are ‘unconcerned with events or any narrative purposes of any sort’ (McCloud, 1993: 77). But readers might nevertheless look for events and narratives even in their absence, especially since they need not be aware of the panels’ non-sequitur organization. Because non-sequitur panel-to-panel ‘transitions may not make “sense” in any traditional way’ (p. 73) they are good vehicles for visualizing the absence of sense, traditionally understood: the messiness, chaos and unpredictability experienced on a day-to-day-level, especially in a (post-)conflict setting. Non-sequiturs would also appear to be adequate forms of approaching the unrepresentable, for example, ‘the sheer randomness of death in the city as well as . . . the mounting number of casualties’ (Donia, 2009: 320) – in short, the ‘senselessness of the war’, its overall ‘stupidity’ (Holbrooke, 1999: 154, 232).
Still, ‘a relationship of some sort will inevitably develop’ (McCloud, 1993: 73). Artists cannot determine what kind of relationship will develop exactly and the emerging relationship will probably differ from one reader to the next. Yet, ‘by creating a sequence with two or more images, we are endowing them with a single overriding identity, and forcing the viewer to consider them as a whole’ (p. 73). While the grid cannot take the reader anywhere the reader does not want to go, artists do have many means at their disposal with which to trick the reader into the intended narrative, provided that artists and readers are socialized in the same way. If not, the result will be failure to communicate. Thus, the mode of representation is as important as the subject of each individual photograph: it helps viewers, by moving slowly from one image to the next and back to the preceding one, to contextualize individual photographs and to develop a sense of the project’s scale.
But perhaps readers want to take their role as co-constructor more seriously; perhaps, they want to take advantage of all possibilities the website offers, including those that imply some form of deviation from standard habits of seeing. Perhaps, they appreciate the panels as individual panels without expecting them to be connected with one another in any meaningful way. Perhaps (Western) readers disregard their socialization in Western culture and do not start their viewing experience in the left upper corner but somewhere else – the fourth image from the left in the fourth row in the
Anxiety and apprehension
Only with time, going back and trying new links, we start to understand how the website works. We notice that clicking on an image provides a path to the same page as clicking
Reading Ritchin’s (2009: 104) account on the creation of the website, we understand that our feelings were perfectly in accordance with the curators’ intentions. Ritchin compares the reader with ‘the journalist who arrives at the Sarajevo airport not knowing where to go, what specific story to explore’. This is a clever move, denying the inter-actors assurance and exposing them to some degree of confusion and, perhaps, anxiety in light of that which is unknown and cannot be planned beforehand: the reader would be required to click on images without knowing where they lead. Unlike a book or magazine, there was no way of quickly flipping forward [or to scroll down, phrase added] to assess and select a path. Each click of the cursor would put a reader on another screen with new perspectives and unknown possibilities. (p. 104)
We wondered if our arrival on the website could also, perhaps, be likened to the people of Sarajevo during the siege whom we expected to have been in possession of only a fragmented sense of the overall conditions prevailing in the city with new and unexpected possibilities – and threats – lurking behind every corner. We immediately appreciate that we can leave the website at any point while the city’s inhabitants were largely denied the possibility of leaving the city during the siege (Andreas, 2008: 58–64). And we came to understand that our confusion aptly expressed the ‘messiness’ typical of such conflicts as the siege of Sarajevo (p. 165). Indeed, our experience ‘seemed slight compared to what had actually been going on in Bosnia’ (Ritchin, 2013: 124).
Yet, we are also puzzled by some of the website’s design features that seem to confirm inadvertently what Ritchin and Peress had set out to criticize. While the division into two parts – SUBURBS and SARAJEVO – offers a multitude of narratives of and insights into the living conditions in Sarajevo at the siege’s end, it also, by separating (Serb-dominated) suburbs from the (Bosniak-dominated) Old Town, supports those political actors who were – and still are! – interested in a clear-cut division between Serbs and Bosniaks, thus denying the pre-siege city’s inter-ethnic reality and inhibiting profound reconciliation across ethnic divides after the siege (see Ristic, 2018). The siege was not only an attack on the city and its inhabitants but also on the idea and practice of ethnic diversity and multiculturalism. Given that the project was meant to show ‘the tentative making of peace’ (Ritchin, 2009: 102) some choices seem odd, including ‘a 360-degree panoramic showing a Serbian cemetery filled with empty holes where bodies once were – the caskets were being dug up by relatives afraid that the dead might soon be desecrated by vengeful enemies’ (p. 106). Re-enacting visually what must have been some of the most nightmarish experiences during the siege hardly seems to be a suitable vehicle for peace and reconciliation.
The website’s structure facilitates open narratives within the two-story lines but renders it difficult to transcend them. Especially the lack of a grid combining suburbs and Sarajevo prevents inter-actors from moving from one storyline to the other. Such a grid, presenting all photographs in random order, would have added to the intended confusion the inter-actor experiences anyway when navigating the website; simultaneously, it would have worked against an understanding of the city – and, by implication, of Bosnia – as clearly divided between two communities thus ignoring inter-ethnic communication that prevailed before and, to some extent, also during the siege (see Markowitz, 2010). 13
In terms of location, the focus on Sarajevo was understandable: Sarajevo had attracted much international attention during the siege, including visits by intellectuals such as Susan Sontag (see Jestrovic, 2013: 115–128; Moser, 2019: chs 34–36) and could be expected to attract more audience interest than a smaller city or a rural area would have generated. Yet, the focus on Sarajevo was also problematic because equating Bosnia with Sarajevo inevitably meant disregarding experiences in other parts of Bosnia which may have been different from and even worse than those in Sarajevo. The project thus reflected and contributed to the twin character of visibility and invisibility observed during the Bosnian war: ‘away from the front-stage cameras in Sarajevo’ guaranteeing maximum visibility, minimum visibility facilitated the continuation of ‘the killings and mass expulsions . . . elsewhere in Bosnia’ (Andreas, 2008: 38–39). This twin character did not go unnoticed with, and was strategically exploited by, the Bosnian Serbs and UN agencies pursuing their own agendas (p. 72).
The time for the project was also well chosen and problematic. It was well chosen because the Dayton Accords, signed in Paris on 14 December 1995, although primarily meant to end the war rather than serving as a sustainable and permanent arrangement (see Bennett, 2016; Holbrooke, 1999: 133, 170), seemed to offer a real perspective for peace after four years of violence; hence the project’s title. It was problematic, however, because the project entered and visually documented the conflict at a specific point thus, although including a chronology that users could study, paying little photographic attention to the conflict’s pre-violence history without which understanding of the current conditions was bound to be limited and biased. Therefore, although the project aimed at departure from conventional journalistic practice, it also reproduced photojournalism’s disregard of violence’s ‘unfolding or underlying causes’ (Ritchin, 1999: 27).
Finally, not all users appreciated the project’s interpretive openness as a means towards reconciliation: ‘the discussion groups were quickly dominated by some of the most racist and vitriolic comments ever to appear in the New York Times’ (Ritchin, 2009: 107), anticipating current social media practices. Such comments showed how long the path to peace in Bosnia still was, despite the Dayton agreement. Indeed, as the project’s title indicates, there would not be just one path to peace; if peace were to prevail, different paths would have to be explored and tested. The comments also showed that when everybody can contribute to discussion groups, just everybody will, including those whose claims are ‘extensive, irrational, and personal’ (p. 108) – another precursor of current social media features. Some form of moderation would seem to have been required but any form of moderation would have undermined the project’s basic lines of thought. And the question remains: who decides whose claims are ‘extensive, irrational, and personal’ and whose are not?
Conclusion
In regard to inter-active documentaries, or ‘i-doc, webdoc, web documentary’ (Vázquez-Herrero and López-Garcia, 2019: 248), Paolo Favero (2013: 260) argues that ‘new, creative, non-linear forms of engagement and interaction between viewers, authors and the material itself, [open] up the terrain for a new politics of viewing and meaning-making.’ They ‘offer more scope for in-depth engagement with a set of complex ideas through the presentation of multiple entry points and simultaneous storylines’ (Aston and Gaudenzi, 2012: 133). Although non-linear and narratively open documentaries ‘challenge the concept of narrative coherence that has been so central to film and television documentary’ (Nash, 2012: 199), they enable new forms of engagement and envision a new politics of reporting and viewing. Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace is a precursor of this kind of interactivity. For this reason, investigating this project is still worthwhile regarding interactivity and narrative openness; it is precisely its rudimentary nature that allows us to explore the potentials and shortcomings of this documentary format. It permits us to think about how such a project could look today, adapted to the changed digital media environment with algorithms further personalizing the viewing experience, ‘engag[ing] the viewer’s history of choices as a primary navigational determinant’ (Ritchin, 2009: 107); readers engaging with the content not on a computer screen but on their smartphones from anywhere on this planet; faster internet connections enabling a multisensory viewing experience combining sound, still images, videos, and texts.
But also, in terms of interaction, the project can be imagined to go further. Even though inter-actors take part in the assembling of the storyline and, thus, in the construction of visual reality, they can barely contribute to the body of visual material. The collection of material is fixed and defined by the curators. Recognizing that today many people frequently engage with their digital environment by sharing visual images online on social media, the threshold to contribute to such a visual project can be assumed to be rather low. In spite of the fact that such a development might even further erode the authorial voice of the curator and the outlet, Peress’s ‘wish to be corrected by people who lived there’, in 1996 a barely realistic idea, nowadays becomes reality: conflict zones, today, are not cut off from the rest of the world anymore; the people ‘who live there’ can now share their visual narratives with the world. How to engage constructively with these new opportunities but also complications is a core challenge for current photojournalism.
Finally, the complexity and messiness of the world becomes increasingly visible and acknowledged. As veteran reporter Jason Burke notes, ‘any major conflict . . . include[s] dozens of smaller ones and the overarching narrative – good vs evil, wrong vs right, us vs them – obscures this messy reality’. 14 Clear-cut black-or-white categories prove increasingly insufficient to describe our social world (see Law, 2004). This also challenges photojournalism and its evidentiary and documentary ambition that is commonly ascribed to both by professionals and audiences. In this messy world, photojournalism’s function is bound to change. Indeed, photojournalistic practice has to evolve to keep its relevance and to fulfill its social role. As we have shown in this article, Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace reflects the world’s expanding messiness and accepts as well as leverages on it rather than aiming to explain ‘the world out there’ authoritatively to the audience.
Footnotes
Funding
Research for this article has been made possible by a generous grant from Kone Foundation (Peace Videography) for which we are very grateful. We would also like to thank two anonymous referees for excellent comments on an earlier draft of this article. There is no conflict of interest.
