Sara Terry

The Aftermath Project: War Is Only Half the Story

by Sara Terry
- USA -


It all goes back, I think, to the day I was standing in a mass grave, hating the fact that I was there, balanced precariously on a mound of bones, camera reluctantly in hand. I’d been asked to make a photo of a partly-preserved pair of hands, the remains of a teenage boy who along with thousands of other Bosnian Muslim men and boys had been murdered by Bosnian Serb forces seven years earlier during the Srebrenica massacre.


Forensic anthropologists Ewa Klonowski (right) and Piotr Drukier examine the partially preserved hands of a teenage boy, found in a mass grave of victims of the 1995 massacre of some 7,000 to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at the hands of Serb forces who overran the U.N. "safe haven" of Srebrenica. The grave, which contained more than 150 intact bodies and some 350 partial remains, was one of the largest mass graves uncovered in Bosnia since the end of the war. Photograph © Sara Terry.
I’d already spent two years working on a long-term photo project about the aftermath of Bosnia’s 1992-95 conflict, documenting the return of refugees, the youth of Sarajevo, the countless quiet, sometimes heartbreaking moments that come with the rebuilding of lives and relationships long after the guns of war have stopped. I had come on this trip in September 2002, knowing that I had yet to take a picture of an exhumation that I felt was a definitive image. And I knew why I had failed: I hate exhumations. I hate the smell, the muck of the pit, the horror of decomposing bodies, the thoughts that stream through my mind about what it must have been like for these people in the final frightening moments of their life. Most of all, I hate the hatred that put them there.
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