Documentary Photography of the Aftermath of War in Bosnia by Sara Terry

I should say, from the beginning, that I never flew into Sarajevo on a military cargo plane, listening anxiously for the sound of artillery fire. I never saw anyone killed in the infamous Sniper Alley that was a death trap during the three-and-a-half years of the seige of Sarajevo by Serb forces. I never had a gun pointed in my face, I never feared for my life, never interviewed a man who would die the next day, a woman who had been gang-raped, a parent who had just buried a child, or a family that fled the blood-soaked soil of a village burned to the ground in the name of “ethnic cleansing.”

No, for me, the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was something that happened far off, in a place I’d never seen. It was something I struggled to understand, or ignored when the news was too depressing, from my home in Boston, where I wrote of other things.

I did not come to Bosnia until the fall of 2000 – drawn at last by a newspaper article that said that just as Bosnians were starting to return to homes they had fled during the war, the international community was becoming “fatigued” with the Balkans tragedy and was starting to move its aid and attention elsewhere. I was angered by such international shortsightedness, and deeply dismayed by the fact that that West was preparing to once again turn its back on Bosnia, just as it had during a war that was marked by the worst genocide in Europe since the end of World War II.

I felt compelled to go, to do whatever I could as a journalist to be a witness to the country’s ongoing struggle to rebuild a civil society. Although I began my career as a print journalist, working for the Christian Science Monitor as a staff writer and later as a freelancer for the New York Times, Rolling Stone and Fast Company, by the year 2000 I was well into a career transition into photography and had been ready for some time to take on a long-term documentary project. [ continued ]