Ammiel Alcalay

In the commodified world of market-driven societies, the idea of individual artists incorporating their visions or practices into a collective endeavor is an enormous leap of faith too rarely taken. Working in societies where this is usually not the case (particularly the Middle East and the Balkans, areas I have been involved in for many years as a translator and critic), I try to “import” texts whose historical moment has not yet fully emerged here, but whose form and content can fundamentally challenge assumptions about personal meaning, the ethical dimension of aesthetics, and the public function of art.

As the national juggernaut propels itself into a future that devours and restructures more and more of the past, too much art begins to seem like mere design whose more resonant role, outside of creative expression or self-referential commentary, is not readily apparent. This reversal of value, in which human or communal solidarity is deemed unsophisticated, masks the extent to which seemingly radical aesthetic positions often mark a disengagement with realities in the world.

In such a climate—outside of rediscovering aspects of American culture that have been relegated to the dustbin or searching for practices that engage critically with the political present—it’s also useful to look elsewhere for instruc-tive responses to conditions of urgency. Evil Doesn’t Live Here: Posters from the Bosnian War (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001) and Sarajevo Self-portrait: The View From Inside (Umbrage Editions, 2000) present stunning and humbling examples of the kinds of liberating and debilitating artistic decisions that emerge from the extreme constraints presented by life and death situations.

The unique perspective provided by Evil Doesn’t Live Here comes from the decision, as Daoud Sarhandi writes in his concise and eloquent introduction, to examine “how the Bosnian people were addressed, by whom, and to what ends during the conflict there.” Since normal channels of communication had broken down, “posters were a cheap and effective way of disseminating information.” Rather than simply a collection or survey of various kinds of posters produced during the war, the book allows for an examination of how information was mobilized for different purposes.

Since examples of posters from all sides in the conflict are reproduced, it is up to the viewer of these images to determine the relationships between aesthetic practice, propaganda, and unequivocal messages of justice and solidarity. The bulk of the book, however, concentrates on the range of posters produced in besieged Bosnia: from the more well-known works by the great Sarajevo design group TRIO, to the important work produced in places like Tuzla and Zenica—somewhat removed from the lens of the global media, but perhaps even more crucial as sites of struggle for the survival of any vestiges of a functioning and resistant multiethnic civil society. One of the great ironies in viewing these posters is the unmistakable sense that, despite the racist rhetoric of cultural inferiority propelled by the Serbian and, to a lesser extent, Croat aggressors toward the Bosnians, the aesthetic practices of the Bosnian artists engaged in the vital work of public representation is infinitely more nuanced and sophisticated than that of their attackers.

Again and again, the Bosnian photographers dwell on the different results and the aesthetic decisions they made because of their perspective and the conditions under which they worked. As Kemal Hadžic, one of the real veterans of Bosnian photography, notes: “I believe that my photographs were different because I was the one living that war as opposed to just doing a job. In the presence of a professional agency photographer, people act how they think they are supposed to act.” Another important photographer, Danilo Krstanovic, writes: “When the foreign journalists started coming to Sarajevo, I have to say that I thought that the Bosnian photographers who stayed here were better than any of them. When it comes to viewpoint, framing, speed of making selections, overall feeling for photography, I still believe that.”

Many photographers tried to alter the imbalanced relationship between themselves and their subjects. One of the most remarkable artists here, Mladen Pikulic, had photographed the horrors of the Serbian siege of Vukovar in Croatia. Returning to exhibit his work in a largely complacent Sarajevo some months before the assault on the city began, Pikulic despaired at the powers of testimony and ended up spending most of his time taking pictures of children on one street in Zenica. “I decided I’d take pictures of them,” Pikulic writes, “instead of dead people or the fighting on the frontlines—you could hurt families with those pictures and I didn’t want to hurt anybody. . . . I never took pictures of children with injuries or crying. I made that decision consciously and it was an important moral choice for me; better to give help than to photograph someone while they are bleeding.”

Nihad Pušija, a photographer now living in Germany, presents this conflict most starkly when he describes witnessing a little girl shot by a sniper just a few feet away from him: “I remember thinking one thing with incredible clarity at that moment: I had to get out of there. Not because I was scared; the sniper didn’t want to shoot me—I was carrying a camera. No, instead I felt, I knew, that he intended it—that he shot her precisely so that I would photograph the dead body of the girl. Why? To produce more propaganda, more fear.” Such experiences get at the root of the ethical dilemmas involved in the amalgam of decisions that go into the creation of any form of representation. There is much to learn by remaining open to the challenges these artists present and allowing their experiences to expand aesthetic and political vocabularies.