These photos are interesting, but be warned, Wired wants to charge you $52 a year to view them, or else install 15 or so 3rd party advertising related cookies and trackers on your computer. I’ve found if you are quick, you can avoid either of these unsatisfying choices…
FRENCH FILMMAKER ADRIEN Selbert was 7 when the Bosnian War started in 1992, and he’s never forgotten the horrible images he saw each night on TV. His fascination with the war and its impact on the country intensified over time, leading him to join a friend in making the 1,100-mile drive from Paris to Srebrenica in 2005. “It was just 10 years after the war, but in a city like Srebrenica, [it] looked like the conflict had ended only yesterday,” he says.
The war killed 100,000 people between 1992 and 1995 and displaced 2.2 million more, making it Europe’s most devastating conflict since World War II. Even now, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains politically and economically fractured, its people divided by ethnicity and religion.
Selbert explores these themes in Nino’s Place, a documentary film he made in 2008, and Srebrenica, Night to Night, a photo series about Bosnian youth in 2014. He returns to them in The Real Edges, an ongoing series of moody vignettes he made while visiting 10 cities, wandering the streets and talking to locals.
His scenes teem with contrasts. In one, a woman relaxes with a cigarette in Markale square, where dozens of civilians died in two bombings during the siege of Sarajevo. In another, a priest baptizes a child in Pale, a Serbian stronghold during that same brutal siege. Selbert occasionally combines scenes to form diptychs and create a dialog. “I like the cinematic idea, theorized by Jean Luc Godard, that two images put together create a third image,” he says.
(click here to continue reading Haunting Photos of Life 20 Years After the Bosnian War | WIRED.)
The photographer’s website is also a source for these photos, without the ad-blocking annoyance, fwiw…