SEASON’S READINGS : Open Wounds

Two books of photographs of the war in former Yugoslavia, and specifically the siege of Sarajevo and Mostar from the summer of 1992 to September of 1993. We see sniper victims lying in the streets, people with arms and legs blown off, corpses wrapped in plastic, wrecked churches and mosques, crowds of refugees on the run, young soldiers proudly wielding their weapons, children playing among the ruins or selling cigarettes. Every window is broken, every street strewn with rubble. After every photograph the inescapable conclusion is that one is looking at the massacre of the innocent, the triumph of evil and stupidity.

The camera is the eyewitness. “Looking at a photograph, I inevitably include in my scrutiny the thought of that instant, however brief, in which a real thing happened to be motionless in front of the eye,” writes Rolland Barthes. This is the power of a documentary photograph. One sits at the breakfast table sipping coffee and turning the pages of the daily newspaper only to come to a photograph of a child killed in the street lying in a pool of blood. Look and see, the photograph tells us, this really happened. The image is far more persuasive than the word. Seeing the dead piled up like lumber to be bulldozed in concentration camps liberated by the Allies at the end of World War II made the unthinkable suddenly believable.

The photograph tells the truth, we think. Still, one needs to be reminded that the pictures of atrocities were used and continue to be used by the media on all sides in former-Yugoslavia to fan the flames of hatred and enrage the various ethnic groups against each other. The rule of the propagandist is: You must never show what we did, but only what the other side did to us. The books under review, for instance, do not show any Serbian dead. Consequently, one cannot look through these photographs without ending by feeling a murderous loathing for the Serbs.

Then there is the question of voyeurism. Who hasn’t felt ashamed by one’s own curiosity in turning the pages of such books? Many of these photographs of atrocities are beautiful as photographs. One finds oneself admiring the godlike man with the camera who sought not only to document the horror, but also managed to catch the aesthetic side of the human drama. There is no such thing as an innocent eye, of course. One frames only a part of what one sees. Inevitably, one makes choices. It takes skill to make a powerful image that “imparts humanity to the inhuman world,” as Clarence John Laughlin said. It is the “art” in the photograph that makes the image stick in our minds.

Gilles Peress’ book has more than 200 photographs without captions. Most of them are taken in a hurry, many from moving vehicles. We don’t know where we are and what the people are running from precisely. Peress is very good at photographing crowds, conveying the panic and the bewilderment of the innocent caught between two sides.

“Suffering people look the same everywhere,” a friend of mine said turning the pages of this book. It’s true. A face contorted with pain or sobs is the same face the world over. What one remembers are the images that individualize the faces in the crowd, images where there is a clear sense of one life, one moment, one human being’s tragic fate.

A man is pushing his grandmother in a wheelbarrow. The family photo album lies open on the floor of a gutted house outside of which the fruit trees are in bloom. It’s springtime. The walls in the city are covered with obituary notices. A child with eyes bandaged is being led down a busy street by his mother. In one of the most powerful images in Peress’ book, a man in the morgue approaches three stretchers with bodies lying on the floor and recognizing a friend or relative covers his face. In the next photograph the same man is turning away with his face still covered. The morgue attendant is expressionless as he stands watching. He has seen all this before.

Sugarman’s photographs are more carefully taken. His book is less the work of a journalist, more the work of a portrait artist. People pause for him. His photographs are identified and captioned. He has a feel for the monumental. The clouds and the dark sky above the ruins give his images a literary quality. I was reminded of Isaac Babel’s stories of the Russian Revolution, the way he juxtaposes lyrical images of nature with horrors of the war: “Fields flowered around us, crimson with poppies . . . lying on his back was an old man, a dead old man. His throat had been torn out and his face cleft in two,” writes Babel.

There are some truly fine photographs in Sugarman’s book: An old man with a cane and a shopping bag all alone crossing a street in Sarajevo. Three mad women holding each other in some unidentified hospital. A new apartment building with all its windows broken. A naked young woman raped and killed. A handsome, very young soldier observing a burial in Sarajevo. A street vendor selling brooms outside some ruins. People squatting under umbrellas at the cemetery during sniper fire; four coffins lying on the ground unattended.

Only the young soldiers and the children are smiling in both books. This corresponds to my own memories of World War II in Yugoslavia. I was 8 years old when the war ended and remember being terribly unhappy that I now had to go to school instead of roaming the streets with my buddies and having fun. As for the soldiers in our neighborhood, we would sit at their feet listening to their adventures with fascination and envy. That’s probably one reason why nobody ever learns anything from history in that unhappy country.

FAREWELL TO BOSNIA Photographs by Gilles Peress (Scalo Publishers: $60; 262 pp.)

GOD BE WITH YOU War in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina Photographs by Martin A. Sugarman (Sugarman Productions/ DAP: $19.95)