A sort of beginning
The main purpose of this blog is pretty selfish. It’s going to be an exploration of photojournalism, war photography and my attraction to (obsession with?) it, primarily to try and understand it myself, see if I can put it on paper (well, on a hard-drive somewhere) and explain it coherently. I’m hoping this might be interesting to other people too.
There are several steps that I think I can identify, some smaller, some larger, that lead to my current situation. One of the most important factors was a local festival, “Vivisect.” The festival started in 2002 and showed Ron Haviv’s exhibition of war photographs from the Bosnian war - “Blood and Honey” - a set of 64 photos shown without titles or captions, with only blank pieces of paper next to them where the visitors could write down their comments. While the comments were shocking and pretty horrible, the photos captured my attention. Back then it was only a visceral reaction, without any rational thought behind it, but looking back I can see that that is when and where I first realized - someone risked their life so that they could show us the horrors that happened just outside our homes. I lived (and still do) about 100km from Vukovar and the border with Croatia. And, while I knew, from news reports, articles and hushed talks of the adults, that the war happened there, I would have never seen what exactly that meant if it weren’t for Haviv’s work.
I was 18 then, with one more year until I could leave high school. I dreamt of being a programmer, a psychologist, maybe even an astrophysicist. Photography was fun, but not even a hobby of mine yet. 3 years later I managed to become interested in photography. A year after that, I fell in love with it. It wasn’t until 2007. and another Vivisect festival, that those feelings, that unease at seeing his photos, the realization how those photos touched me came back. The photos at this new exhibition weren’t about Yugoslavia, they weren’t in our backyard. The VII photographers were all working on stories about terrorism and extremism. And, even though the news were, once again, full of stories and images from Afghanistan and Iraq, the photos hit me even harder. I kept coming back, day after day, for the full duration of the festival, not only to watch the documentary movies they kept showing - I spent hours in the single large room, looking at the 30 or so photos, trying to articulate what I was feeling.
That was the point where realized how incredibly powerful these photos were, how, despite the flood of information about the war on terrorism and the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, I had nothing but a vague idea of what was going on there. I intend to talk more about that festival later on, it was a turning point for me, the moment where I not only decided that the work they were doing was big, important, something that needs to be done, I also decided (at least quietly and secretly, to myself) that photography, photojournalism specifically, was something that I need to do. It took me two more years to decide to actually give in to that decision. But that’s the topic for another post, later on.
From the very moment I was introduced to photojournalism, it was through war photography. I have come into it with this unreal and strange expectation that all the photos I do must be big, dramatic, must be able to change the world. As I’ve researched more and, especially after I started working as a photojournalist, I’ve had to change my views. Not every story is big, not every story is dramatic. In fact, most of them aren’t. And that is great. I am not certain I understand how people who work exclusively as war photographers function. I’m not really sure what being in that situation does to a person, how it changes you.
What I do know is that, while photojournalism on a local level is a wonderful way to learn and meet other photographers, it is not my goal. I’d like it to be a stepladder to something bigger. It need not be war photography, but it has to mean something. It feels weird to say this our loud but, the reason photojournalism is what I want to do is because I want to change the world.
I want to give my best to make the world a better place and my best is my photography.
