Sarajevo (Motta Photography S.) - Tapa dura

In 1992 British photojournalist Tom Stoddart was gravely wounded in Sarajevo, but he returned to the besieged city during the grueling winter of 1993 to record the plight of its remaining citizens in their daily efforts to survive destruction, bereavement, and fear.
Portraying not frontline fighters but the ordinary citizens who endured the brunt of the siege, the images created by Stoddart during his two visits convey the trauma of war in the faces and gestures of those forced to assimilate it into their daily lives. Women carrying shopping bags run for cover across an intersection that became known as Sniper Alley; a cellist breaks down in tears after performing a requiem for a dead friend; a burnt, disfigured boy, injured by a mortar while playing near his home, waits quietly in an emergency room.
Stoddart's photographs also show Sarajevans carrying on with their lives, combatting their apprehension and grief, picking their way through shattered streets.
An essay by a leading Bosnian writer sets the siege of Sarajevo in the context of a war based on deep religious and ethnic fissures and exacerbated by international indifference. But the photographs themselves, while depicting tragedy, are testament to the resiliency and courage of those who faced its brutality every day.

Predrag Matvejevic is a professor of Slavic studies at La Sapienza University in Rome.