Messiness in photography, war and transitions to peace: Revisiting Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace

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.