On the wire
Damir Sagolj
Reuters
Damir Sagolj is a news photographer, working to daily deadlines. But he portrays events in the faces of bystanders, not through the eyes of actors who are centre stage.
I remember the faces he captures more than the places he has been. His itinerary is a list of the world’s friction points but the landscape of war and the apparatus of violence hold no interest. Damir would rather take us into the closed rooms, the tight spaces of isolation, poverty and pain, where victims endure their misery and mourn their relatives.
Damir works on the fringes of death, yet always finds a spark of life. He is a realist and will not conjure hope where none exists – the sparks he sees are often fading.
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I travelled with him on a long, tiring story. He ignored the movement and the machinery of combat, the hectic activity of men wrapped in their sense of purpose. He waited until we stopped, so moments of rest could bring out troubling perspectives from beneath the layers of resolve. When he could not find faces he played with shapes, seeing lines and angles that boxed in the soldiers, portraying them more suggestively than I could manage in a news story.
Damir watched Bosnia fall apart and has stood over more graves and been to more funerals in that country than most of us could endure. He was a Sarajevo soldier for three years but says proudly that he never fired his gun. He has refused to be choked by the powerful grip death still has on Bosnia. In Damir’s images the morgues full of Srebrenica victims bear testament to lives that should not have been taken – his photographs do not allow us to despair.
Sean Maguire, Reuters Editor, Central and Eastern Europe
