You Are My Witness
I took the first of these photographs in Sarajevo, beside the Catholic Sacred Heart Cathedral, in the old part of the city.
You can’t miss the sign on the wall adjacent to it. High above the street is a poster calling attention to the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Exhibition. In it, an elderly face looks down over the square, and beneath are four words:
You Are My Witness.
The other photographs were taken at The Tunnel of Hope, along the memorial fence — images just hanging there, nothing formal or framed about their presentation.
The tunnel runs beneath the airport runway. During the war, the airport was under UN control, and the tunnel became a vital connection between besieged Sarajevo and territory beyond it.
The UN’s theme for this year’s International Day of Peace is “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.”
What struck me as I was shooting the scene was that this was not simply a record of war, but a record of ordinary life continuing inside the siege.
People gathered together. Someone carrying something. Men cutting wood in a street. A child with an axe almost too large for him. An airport runway. Wire and fencing.
Small acts of survival preserved in photographs.
Perhaps that is one of the difficulties with the word peace. We use it so often that it can become enormous and abstract — something negotiated somewhere else, by somebody else, or perhaps by important people.
But war is not abstract when its history is attached to streets where people walked, houses where people lived, or photographs of children doing what had to be done that day.
And neither, perhaps, is peace.
Peace must eventually come down to the ordinary scale of things: being able to go home; to feed a family; to cross a street without fear; to allow children the luxury of being children.
On International Day of Peace, these photographs from Sarajevo seem worth returning to.
Not because memory should keep us permanently inside the past, but because memory can tell us what peace is for.
Memory can be more than a junk room for the past.
You are my witness.
You can’t miss the sign on the wall adjacent to it. High above the street is a poster calling attention to the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Exhibition. In it, an elderly face looks down over the square, and beneath are four words:
You Are My Witness.
The other photographs were taken at The Tunnel of Hope, along the memorial fence — images just hanging there, nothing formal or framed about their presentation.
The tunnel runs beneath the airport runway. During the war, the airport was under UN control, and the tunnel became a vital connection between besieged Sarajevo and territory beyond it.
The UN’s theme for this year’s International Day of Peace is “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.”
What struck me as I was shooting the scene was that this was not simply a record of war, but a record of ordinary life continuing inside the siege.
People gathered together. Someone carrying something. Men cutting wood in a street. A child with an axe almost too large for him. An airport runway. Wire and fencing.
Small acts of survival preserved in photographs.
Perhaps that is one of the difficulties with the word peace. We use it so often that it can become enormous and abstract — something negotiated somewhere else, by somebody else, or perhaps by important people.
But war is not abstract when its history is attached to streets where people walked, houses where people lived, or photographs of children doing what had to be done that day.
And neither, perhaps, is peace.
Peace must eventually come down to the ordinary scale of things: being able to go home; to feed a family; to cross a street without fear; to allow children the luxury of being children.
On International Day of Peace, these photographs from Sarajevo seem worth returning to.
Not because memory should keep us permanently inside the past, but because memory can tell us what peace is for.
Memory can be more than a junk room for the past.
You are my witness.