Back in 1993 I was on my way to a friend’s wedding on the New South Wales central coast. I booked into a motel in Kariong that seemed near enough. Other guests were also staying there. I’d hitch a ride down with them to the happy event.
As I rested up, I leafed through a fresh copy of Vanity Fair. I was never a big fan of Annie Leibovitz’s theatrical celebrity photographs for that magazine, much preferring her earlier, more rock n roll and documentary work for Rolling Stone. So it was a bit of a surprise to find she had gone to Sarajevo (with Susan Sontag) to photograph the people of the besieged city for VF.
The power of the black-and-white images deeply affected me and I began writing a poem as I studied the images and the captions that told me a little of what was happening. There was something incongruous and ‘consuming’ about it too: stunning photographs of people in the middle of a war presented in one of the world’s glossiest and most prestigious celebrity magazines for a readership far removed from all that they were experiencing.
I tried to catch something of the truth in the images, nonetheless, the drama and energy of the people that Leibovitz’s lens had caught as she roved Sarajevo.
I also tried to mix in my own complicit relationship to the images, acknowledging them as both a real-life drama and an aesthetic encounter. A tension that is, of course, part of the eternal nature of frontline and conflict journalism – most especially photojournalism, which requires a particular kind of intimacy to get the necessary ‘shots’.
In this case, Liebovitz’s work was as much about life in the city carrying on as usual (kind of), as it was about the war itself, but the ‘conflict’ was still present and unmistakeable in the images – as well as how I was looking at them.
There’s apparently a new documentary called Kiss the Future that focuses on this same period for Sarajevo in the early 1990s, looking at the people of the city and dealing more broadly with the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War. It also features what was, by all accounts, a very inspiring post-war concert by U2 in 1997, as well as interviews with everyone from Bill Clinton to Christiane Amanpour, who was covering things at street level in Sarajevo in 1993.
Kiss the Future has screened at a few film festivals and will apparently be available through streaming outlets later this year. When a preview popped up in my social media feed I had all kinds of flashbacks to the wars we have ‘grown up with’ across this last half century.
The line between concern and consumption, news and entertainment, can get blurry as I have suggested. It is even a violence all its own: a form of informational imperialism, trauma-tainment that has not gotten any simpler or cleaner with our online lives and habits.
And yet those old Annie Leibovitz photos retain a power and a truth that is undeniable. I hope some part of their energy filtered into the poem I wrote at the time back in 1993. I always felt I was surfing on the distilled moments to somehow honour the people in the images, as well as Liebovitz’s artistry and how it affected me one afternoon long ago. I didn’t just forget them.
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Image: Annie Leibovitz, Bloody Bicycle, (Sarajevo, 1993)
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‘A View of Sarajevo from the Bella Vista Motel’ was first published in the literary journal Meanjin, Volume 53, Issue 3, September 1994
How easy is the memory of one war replaced by another in my memory?
How lucky am I never to have experienced war in my country?
How sad that so many people have experienced and are experiencing war in their homes?