My timing is great, I finally find a computer to use while my laptop is out of commission and I end up heading on the road immediately. Sorry again for my absence here over the last while, it has been rough going with internet and computer access since I’ve been back in Serbia. Big thanks to M Scott for keeping excellent thoughts and links going. I promise to work extra hard when I’m back in town with a working computer.

I am on my way to Sarajevo and other locales in Bosnia this weekend to continue my work on a project I began last year, called This Time Tomorrow, looking at the present stagnation and possible futures for Bosnia and Herzegovina. I’ll share the next installment when I am back in Belgrade.

But I’m not leaving you with nothing, as I will unveil the first installment of a long-awaited new section of dvafoto called the Book Club very soon and an interview with photographer Molly Landreth to follow. Stay tuned.

2009 was my first real year of living and working in Serbia and it was wrought with more questions than answers. I’m still trying to figure out what last year was and what the next will bring, in terms of life and my photos. But I think these pictures may show some of what this was about for me, my relationship to friends and strangers, places and stories. These are not just my “best” pictures but include many more personal. A visual taste of my year. And I’m ecstatic to be back for another take.

Of course, I am a month past due with this in part to recovering from the holidays stateside and setting up everything here for 2010. I’ll have much more to share in the near future on what’s new these days, including projects, collaborations and websites. As always you can see my work at www.mattlutton.com and dig through my archive (and buy pictures!) at archive.mattlutton.com.

Thanks for keeping up with my work and supporting us here at Dvafoto. Happy New Year!

So, I was not in Perpignan last week like I said and planned to be. A story that I have been working on since April about the displacement of significant and entrenched Roma settlements here in Belgrade hit its climax last Monday and I decided to stay here to photograph. I look forward to sharing part of this important story soon.
But first I wanted to share some new images that I mentioned a few weeks ago from my Kosovo New Born project, which I began in 2007.

I returned to the youngest country in the world again in early August to get further into the periphery of issues and locations that are at the heart of Kosovo’s political and economic stability and viability. While it was a difficult trip, with some closed doors and unproductive scheduling, I am pleased that many pictures are contributing new visions and perspectives on the broader sentiments I am hoping to capture with this project.

The next step for me is to (frighteningly enough) prepare a book dummy for this admittedly unfinished body of work. I started my degree at the University of Washington six years ago and I’ve decided that it is high time to finally graduate. So I endeavor to finish my last requirement: a thesis. As a multidisciplinary exercise for my degree in the Comparative History of Ideas program I am attempting to create a historical, documentary and scholarly approach to Kosovo in the form of a more permanent contemporary photographic document. Hence my interest in Peter van Agtmael’s new book 2nd Tour, Hope I don’t Die, which I think works on much the same level. As this project comes together I’ll have more to share, though I’m sure it will take more time than I’ve budgeted in my head.

Also in Balkan news, I’ve seen (and have been sent) a number of increasingly alarmist articles about the dire state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In my opinion, and that of many smart colleagues here, while it is not a happy or stable place Bosnia isn’t about to explode either. As a western writer friend here opined, this is as much a cry for relevance by Balkan commentators in this short-attention span world as anything else (and as someone with interest in keeping eyes on the important stories here, I’m not exactly against this). So that said, the continuing slow decline of Bosnia’s political foundations is worth paying attention to. I’m continuing to photograph some of these ideas with my project This Time Tomorrow: Post-War Bosnia at the Crossroads and will try to provide updates from my perspective here in Belgrade.

I’m glad to see M. Scott’s new posts, not least of which it keeps you all busy with content while I get myself back in gear to post more. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been on the road over the last few weeks photographing a number of things: in Bosnia the Srebrenica Anniversary and the famous bridge divers in Mostar and more recently new work on my project Kosovo New Born. I will have a longer post in the next week or so talking about this Kosovo work, with updates from this trip and my plans to bring it together in book form and as a feature at a popular web magazine.
The next few weeks, before a dvafoto trip to Perpignan for Visa pour l’Image (more from M Scott and I on this soon!), will be devoted to editing and producing a book dummy and continuing with the Roma Relocation project here in Belgrade.

Speaking of books, I just came across 2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die by Peter van Agtmael, just published by Photolucida through their Critical Mass portfolio review. I’ve been ambivalent about some of van Agtmael’s work in the past but this package really seems to codify an interesting perspective and photographs about our modern American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would be very interested to see this in person, do let me know if you get a copy. I’m curious how this sort of personal narrative about a larger “news” story works in book form, not least of which because I’m approaching this with my work, but also for its ability to open a possibly new medium for distributing long term documentary that is closer to what typically runs in the mainstream press than book publishing.

July 11, 2009 was the fourteenth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina and it was marked by another mass funeral for some 520 souls whose remains were identified in the last year. Estimates of the total deaths in this genocide are around 8000 Muslim men and boys. I previously visited the town of Srebrenica and the memorial in the nearby village of Potocari in 2007 as a student traveler in Bosnia, and this past Saturday was my first return to the site since then. I rode one of dozens of free buses from around Bosnia to the memorial service with scores of pilgrims and family members of the victims. Of course a sad, powerful day but more than a decade on from the event an attitude of solidarity and keeping the memory alive sweeps through the crowd. There is still grief, and fear, amongst those who experienced this horrible event but we are entering a time where the future, not the past, is what must be called in to question. Next year will be the fifteenth anniversary of Srebrenica, and there will again be a burial of many more victims along with speeches from many honorable guests, and we will still ask why. But now too we must face the fact that politics and social development are reaching the stagnated limits of the Dayton Accords and some sort of break with this peace treaty must happen. Slowly or suddenly, Bosnia and Herzegovina must avert itself from its current dead-end path towards some polity that is equitable, sustainable and promising. This country today displays hardly any reflection of those attributes, a harsh reality in this worsening economic climate along a steep path towards European integration.

These are a few pictures from the ride and memorial. A memorable day, not least for the incredible effort amongst all the people to make it out to the remote town. The buses were to leave Sarajevo at 5am but were delayed by the crowds of citizens who could not fit into the allotted amount of buses, who demanded transportation to the memorial before they would clear the road. Hours late my bus, filled with somber but enthusiastic pilgrims, arrived at the field and grave site before a humbling prayer and burial service. After, on the ride home, everyone was in a good, warm mood filled with pride for being able to honor the memorial with their presence. This was a fascinating experience and I was honored to visit with the Bosnians who worked hard to pay their respects.

This weekend will be the fourteenth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide in Bosnia. I will be there to continue my documentation of the Srebrenica memorial as part of my larger body of work about modern Bosnia called “This Time Tomorrow”.

I’ll be on the road for the next few weeks while reporting in Bosnia (as part of “This Time Tomorrow”) and in Kosovo for my ongoing project “Kosovo New Born”. You can reach me via my general cell number +381 065 678 5316 (Serbia) but at times I will be on +387 066 141 432 (Bosnia) and +377 049 132 953 (Kosovo) as well as my email luttonm (at) gmail. I look forward to posting my work here in the future, as well as other links and pictures I find along the way, though my posting will likely slow over the coming weeks. Srećan put.

I wanted to share my latest project which I shot over two weeks in March, which I probably hinted at in some earlier posts. This Time Tomorrow: Post-War Bosnia at the Crossroads is my attempt to describe a complex feeling that is settling in around Bosnia about its hopes for a prosperous future.

I have been introducing these pictures with this text:

Bosnia is facing a growing challenge to efficient and prosperous survival as time advances with a peace treaty functioning as a constitution. We read more and more often news stories about Bosnia’s instability and ill-prospects for a unified future with two ‘entities’ – the Federation and Republika Srbska – butting heads amongst entrenched political and ethnic divides. Citizens and the economy are inching toward a precipice prepared by political interest and ineffectual international oversight. War is not going to be the answer, but innocent people will suffer just the same.

But here is the longer version (with informative links!) that I hope will more fully explain the situation in Bosnia today:

For almost fifteen years since the Dayton Agreement the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has stayed together through one of the world’s most complex political arrangements. Bosnia’s constitution, which mandates two ‘entities’ (consisting of the Federation of Bosniaks and Croats and the Republika Srbska of Bosnian Serbs), is an annex to a peace treaty. Further, the EU’s High Representative gives the international community final veto power over the country’s tripartite presidency. It is obvious to most observers that this inefficient and corruption-rich system cannot exist indefinitely. In recent months politicians from all sides are protesting frequently about the untenability of the current arrangement as a challenge to their sovereignty (as an ethnic group, an entity or, rarely, as the whole nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina). Old tensions remain, there are divided cities where one ethnic group doesn’t cross an invisible line for lingering fears, real or imagined, of conflict.

I hope these images can communicate the tensions that remain in Bosnia with high unemployment, political stagnation, a looming economic catastrophe and a pessimistic outlook on the future. Old interests and battles, frozen in 1995, remain relevant for much of the population and distrust is high. How will this nation, and the international community, reform and reconstitute one of the world’s more clumsy attempts at nation building?

This is a strange project for me, and of course I’m thankful for all the positive reviews so far, but I can’t quite wrap my head around these pictures. Maybe its the ephemeral thesis, trying to capture this feeling I was talking about, and I’m not convinced the pictures are successful in that vein. Of course they’re also a bit too focused on the Muslim portions of Bosnia, where I was living and where most of my friends are, but the ‘idea’ remains. I look forward to your feedback, questions or suggestions.. I’d love a conversation here on Dva.

Many thanks are due to my friend Jasmin Brutus for hosting me in Sarajevo and Dado Ruvic (who I just wrote about here on Dva) for showing me around Zenica. Two wonderful men and photographers, thank you both!

Dado Ruvic is a 19 year old Bosnian photographer living in the city of Zenica, about an hour and a half north of Sarajevo. He works as a freelancer with Reuters, under the tutelage of local legend Damir Sagolj, and a Croatian agency called CroPix. Despite solid clients and assignments at his age, he’s hungry and he is busting his ass off (for peanuts!). It is so great seeing a young photographer working this hard on his pictures. While working mostly for wires now and shooting singles, I hope he pushes for more features and stories.

I met Ruvic in person a few weeks ago in Zenica while I was hanging out in Bosnia and was able to spend a day seeing the city and working, without much prior planning as you’ll see. I was introduced to him by mutual friend Jasmin Brutus.

Here are a few pictures he sent me from a story Ruvic did at a coal mine in the hills above Zenica (in a single day if I remember correctly). Ironically and unfortunately, the day that I visited Ruvic we ended up back at this same mine due to an accident there that injured 14 and killed one. You can see Ruvic’s pictures from this story on his oft-updated blog. I’ll post my pictures soon when I do a wrap-up of my work from Bosnia. Ruvic was entirely on top of this story from the moment his cell phone went off, completing his current assignment and then taking us running for a car to drive us the 10km to the site. After, we went into the emergency room at the hospital to see the victims where he then transmitted on site to Reuters while coordinating the writer and video person, who were more than twice his age. Very impressive.

Click on the pictures to go to his blog where you can see more from this feature.




He is definitely one to watch and I know we’ll be keeping in touch. Keep working your ass off Dado, but just remember to eat when you’re doing it! No more working yourself to collapse. (Self-portraits of his photo-related injury).

I’ve been hanging out in Sarajevo this week as a bit of a respite from Belgrade and to get some reading and research done for a few new projects I’m trying to get off the ground. So, sorry for the lack of posting . Luckily we have M. Scott who keeps the great stuff coming…

I’ve got a couple of quick things to offer before my battery dies (for all its charms Sarajevo lacks decent internet places where I can take the time to actually look at stuff and post). First, for quick-hits of things I’m reading or finding interesting, that aren’t just related to photo (and thus don’t get much play on dva) I recommend subscribing to this rss feed of my postings to facebook. Yea, oldschool .. I should be using twitter .. but this is an easy way for me to share with friends stories and things that I’m digging.

Second, congrats are in order (again) to friend and inspiration Jonas Bendiksen who picked up another great prize this week. You’ll probably have to use Google Translate for that page unless you speak Norwegian… Also, I found this news out via Magnum’s new Twitter page, which features news, links and (it appears) interviews with Magnum photographers who are in the office. Very energetic.

all for now thanks

Spent a long, tough day at Nic Madrazo’s funeral. Haven’t really looked at the pictures yet, maybe tomorrow. I’ll share when I can.

I read M. Scott’s post (a couple below this) about the pollution caused by used consumer electronics. He had a link to a National Geographic story about industry in Ghana where they burn coated electrical wire to expose the valuable metal filament and sell it for scrap. As it turns out, I stumbled upon the very same situation in May when I was in a small town in Bosnia near Sarajevo, visiting my good friend Jasmin Brutus in his hometown of Visoko. Same town, if you know your odd history, of the Bosnian Pyramids which I photographed in ‘07.

So, here’s one of my pictures from that scene. A old man digs in the dirt for scrap metal. He even has a pacemaker.