Framing the unforgettable: Photography as a tool for negotiating and reimag(in)ing the memories of the missing relatives

Introduction

We forget, too easily perhaps, that behind every face, even our own faces, is a vast untapped landscape – in many cases a landscape of horror concealed – that continues to contain the seeds of the past. Those of us nurtured in peacetime forget at our peril the precariousness of life and of personhood. (Edkins, 2011: 5)

The genocidal violence that happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) during the 1992–1995 war resulted in the grave loss of human lives. With total of more than 100,000 casualties, between 20,000 to 50,000 raped women and girls (Allen, 1996; Stiglmayer, 1994), and tens of thousands of wounded, disabled and tortured individuals, the conflict in Bosnia was jurisprudentially characterised as a ‘crime against humanity’ (International Crime Tribunal for former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 2001). In addition, Bosnia lost almost half of its pre-war population ¹ to forced migration (Halilovich et al., 2018), forming the most widely dispersed diaspora from the Balkans (MHRRBiH, 2017: 67). Yet, what is specific for the Bosnian conflict is the ontologically precarious category of ‘the missing’ (nestali) ² – the whopping figure of 32,000 that disappeared during the war. However, it was firmly established that ‘the missing’ were actually killed and buried in the clandestine mass graves (Halilovich, 2014, 2019; Petrović-Šteger, 2009; Stover and Peress, 1998), where the majority of victims were ethnic Bosniaks, ³ killed by their Serb neighbours and compatriots (International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), 2019; Tokača, 2012).

In the Bosnian War, the graver the atrocities, the greater the number of the disappeared – and this proved particularly true for the northwest and eastern parts of Bosnia (ICTY, 2004). These two regions were almost completely cleansed of their ancestral non-Serb inhabitants, where men ended up killed and buried in the mass graves, whereas women and children were forced to flee (Pervanić, 1999; Wesselingh and Vaulerin, 2005). As Halilovich (2013) recounts, many Bosnian families – especially those that survived the horrors of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide and 1992 ‘ethnic cleansing’ ⁴ in Prijedor – are reduced to a war widow and her children, not rarely divested of sons, uncles and other male relatives (Halilovich, 2019). The absence of any father figure posed innumerable challenges for the surviving children, for whom the early trauma of the genocidal violence and loss of parents catalysed ‘premature’ maturation and fostered a quite distorted sense of reality (cf. Suleiman, 2002).

On the contrary, Bosniak war widows grappled with different challenges, which did not leave them much time to reflect on their tragedies, since they had to concurrently assume the role of a provider and that of a nurturer. This was particularly difficult, considering that majority of war widows come from rural backgrounds, where they conventionally assumed the role of homemakers and housewives, thereby lacking both formal occupational experience and education (Hadziomerovic, 2023a, 2023b; Halilovich, 2019; Jacobs, 2017; Jones, 2000). Subsequently, many families left Bosnia and found refuge in the new countries of resettlement (Halilovich, 2015b; Valenta and Strabac, 2013). As Halilovich (2015a) avers, the forced migration of Bosnians is inseparable from the genocidal campaign carried out against the indigenous Bosniak population. As he discovered in his own ethnographic engagement with the Bosnian War-induced diaspora worldwide, their social organisation follows their affiliation along the (former) local and regional lines, which Halilovich (2013) conceptualised as trans-localism. The trans-local(ised) groups from destroyed towns, such as Srebrenica and Prijedor, are very specific because they represent an attempt of survivors to recreate their once vibrant communities in the new places of resettlement (Jacobs, 2017).

As for the missing husbands, fathers, sons, brothers and numerous others, even three decades after they perished, the efforts to account for them are still ongoing. To redress the mistakes that resulted in ‘miscalculation’ of the blood spilled during the Bosnian War, the international community formed the ICMP, with mandate to account for all the missing persons who disappeared during the Yugoslav Wars (Jennings, 2013; Wagner, 2008). Accounting for the ghastly damage done to the Bosnian demographic, the commission established forensic morgues and labs in post-war Tuzla and Sanski Most, where they mostly assemble the commingled human remains retrieved from the mass graves around Prijedor and Srebrenica (Huffine et al., 2001; Jennings, 2013). As Jugo and Wastell (2016) explain, the burial of victims in the mass graves and subsequent commingling duplicates the destruction of both the victims’ bodies and their collective (Bosniak) identity. On the contrary, Fournet (2007) argues, the dismemberment of the corpses through re-burials destroys the individual identity of a victim that in turn facilitates ‘their total eradication from both individual memories and collective memory. And indeed, if the victims are completely physically destroyed, if their bodies become unrecognizable and unidentifiable and thus do not allow their uniting to the human genre, their whole existence will disappear with their bodies’ (Fournet, 2007: n.p., emphasis is mine).

We see that the destruction of corpses is not only aimed at the destruction of materiality of the crime, but also of the memory of its victims. Indeed, for the surviving families, the context of ‘missingness’, marked by the uncertainty of retrieval, the incompleteness of skeletons retrieved and the substantial percentage of the bodies yet to be found and retrieved, only further complicates the process of grieving and coming to terms with the dramatic loss of loved ones (Wagner, 2014, 2015). With the passage of time, the memories of the deceased fade, and this natural process encounters harsh resistance from the families of the missing-dead, for they do not have a grave that demarcates the final resting spot, an epitaph to their beloved’s once-existence. Instead, in their attempts to counter the genocidal damage done to their loved ones’ individual identities, the families demonstrate a certain tenacity in holding onto their memories, including the use of creative tools and technologies through which they frame their personal remembrances.

At the centre of this article is photography and its use and manipulation in the service of memory. I discuss three cases of visual manipulation of image: a photo collage, an animation and a frame capture, through which surviving family members channel, imagine and perform their memories of the perished relatives.

Research design and methods

The data used and analysed in this article stem from my PhD research study of the sociocultural implications of the mass disappearances from the Bosnian genocide for the everyday lives, social identities, memories and migration patterns of the surviving families in the diaspora. The period between May 2021 and December 2022, I spent ‘in the field’, conducting my anthropological study of ‘gaps, absences and silences’, incurred by the mass missingness with the trans-local communities of surviving Srebreničani and Prijedorčani ⁵ in Melbourne (Australia) and St. Louis (the United States). The reason for focusing on these two cities lies in the fact that they received the greatest numbers of Bosniak war refugees outside of Europe, especially those from the aforementioned localities (cf. Cogo and McCarthy, 2022; Halilovich, 2013).

In my research design, I combined mixed ethnography (Halilovich and Kučuk, 2020), comprised of conventional, multi-sited (Marcus, 1995) and digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016), with methodology of narrative inquiry. I situated my research approach within the philosophy of participatory action research, ensuring the active involvement of my participants in all stages of the research. My primary data collection methods were ethnographic in-depth interviews – forty of them conducted with families of the missing – and participant observation. In my study, I was particularly focused on the practices of mourning and remembering the missing from the distance. Hence, I engaged both by participating in and observing not only the trans-local commemorations, but also the daily lives of my participants, as well as various community formal and informal events.

I supplemented my core ethnographic dataset by incorporating the insights obtained through a visual analysis of diverse artistic representations of the missing, with a particular focus on photography as the primary medium. For this article, I discuss the findings from my visual analysis of the photos sourced from the intimate archives of my participants and an example from Bosnian artist, whose work I followed for the last few years. In the present article, I braid together my ethnographic findings from the field with those from my close engagement with the medium of photography, to discuss the latter’s role in safekeeping the memories of the perished kin.

Re-framing the memories of loss

Every night, before we all went to sleep, I observed my ‘host mother’ Hasija closing the circle of the day with the night prayer ( ;jacija) in her American home. After the harrowing life under the siege of her hometown of Srebrenica, where she gave two births and lost two brothers in the genocide, Hasija and her family re-made life far away from their traumascapes (Tumarkin, 2005) that they once called home. After the prayer, she stays for some time, counting the blessings and whispering the prayers in remembrance of her two young brothers that perished in the Srebrenica Genocide, and have not been found yet.

What makes Hasija different than the majority of Srebrenica surviving women is the rare stroke of luck where her husband managed to survive the infamous Death March across the mountains in Podrinje, ⁶ where thousands of men were ambushed, lured and brutally killed in July 1995. Yet, like the majority of Srebrenica refugee women (both in the United States and in Australia), Hasija works as a housekeeper in the homes of affluent American families. Certainly, more reflective of her pre-war occupation as housewife and of the Bosnian housekeeping standards, than of her current job, was Hasija’s pristine home in St. Louis. Her living room was decorated with high-rising potted orchids and the traditional Bosnian items on display, such as coffee sets, Arabic ornaments and handmade doilies, hanging from the TV and cabinets. What attracted the most attention, however, were the family photo collages.

The first one that captured me was the collage of her whole ‘pre-war’ family, which Hasija kept positioned centrally in her living room, as a constant reminder of what she lost and left behind after the genocide and exile. Yet, the most poignant was a photo collage composed of cut-out images of her two brothers, Fuad and Mirza, who perished in the Srebrenica Genocide. The collage was displayed in a standing frame on the fireplace, so that she can brush her gaze against it and remember them, whenever she passes by.

The collage pictures the two brothers next to each other, their faces reflecting the different times when the photos were taken: Mirza, dressed casually, smiling softly at the camera as the sun washes over his face – the picture taken years before he died. Fuad’s face, on the contrary, mirrored the stark reality in which he found himself entrapped at the time, wearing white coat like all volunteers in Srebrenica’s war hospital – the photo taken only 4 days before he disappeared with more than eight thousand others in the genocide. In the background, the recognisable buildings from the Srebrenica town square are peaking.

In his seminal work, Pierre Nora (1989) contended that ‘We speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’ (p. 7). This is even more prominent in the context of the missing persons and mental battles that each survivor attends in efforts to salvage the memory of their beloved before it slips away into oblivion. This collage seems to contain everything that Hasija irrevocably lost in July 1995, yet at the same time representing her last attempt to preserve the vivid memory of her missing siblings, by bringing them together for a brief moment to memorialise and reify their once-existence (cf. Edkins, 2011).

When I spotted the original version of the collage in her family album, I detected the slight visual nuances between the two. Hasija told me that after she made the first collage with scissors and glue, she decided to take it to the professional photo editor and made a request to ‘make the photo more real’. Subsequently, he added the illusion of shadows behind the boys and adjusted the lighting in the superimposed image, blurring the borders between the cut-outs and hence rendering the scene more convincing – as if the two brothers were actually together when the photo was taken. For a religious woman, such as Hasija, the picturing of two of her brothers together personifies her daily prayers and consoling belief that they are indeed together in the Hereafter. ⁷ Hasija is not the only one who engages in collage-making from the chards of her personal loss, as this is a widely present phenomenon, almost becoming a post-genocide customary practice of dealing with the loss and resulting fragmentation of families.

This symbolic re-ordering of reality and memories through manipulation of the visual medium is a powerful metaphor for a universal human need to make sense out of loss. The latter is particularly ‘puzzling’, in the words of Jennings (2013), within the context of the Bosnian missing: persons, bodies and their identities. Indeed, the creative use of photography in facilitating meaning-making in relation to the death of the loved one is not a novelty (cf. Jiménez-Alonso and Brescó de Luna, 2022; Riches and Dawson, 1998). In her own account of negotiating the traumatic loss of a child, and herself in relation to the death, through the practice of collage-making, Sharon Strouse (2014) recounts:

My creative process unlocked doors to unexplored feelings. I was empowered through the act of creating. I gained control and engaged what I was reticent to talk about . . . The creative process demanded my presence, which was transformative, for over time I witnessed my emerging self. (p. 198)

As Strouse emphasises, engagement in the craft of collage imparts a sense of control over narrative of loss and how it engraves into us. These sentiments can help us understand the example of Hasija’s photo collage, where she takes charge over the fragmented memories, merging them into the idea that helps her move on.

Breathing life into the absence

Nora (1989) suggested that modern memory is in and of itself archival, since ‘[. . .] it relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image’ (p. 13). In the Srebrenica Memorial Centre – a museum and heritage institution – the display of assembled personal effects and walls splattered with the dried blood, the echo of muttered radio recordings and faded photographs constitute a powerful antidote to the quantified, ethnicised and deeply depersonalised treatment of the memories of the genocide victims, for they all testify to their individual existence as a human being separate from the mass grave that levelled them with the ground. These sensorial cues serve as the palpable reminders of the lives abruptly taken and the profound human tragedy that unfolded in a particular place and time. Without the materiality of the absence representing its sheer magnitude, the victims would otherwise wane in the numbers and denominators of collective identity – along with our empathy.

Next to Hasija’s case, another poignant example of reviving the image is that of a multimedia artist, Enes Žuljević, who lost his father to the war in Bosnia. Žuljević was a child during the war and has vivid recollections of it. Unfortunately, he was too young to remember his father who died in the war. All he was left with were a few of his photographs. Like thousands of children who lost their fathers in the tempest of war, he recounted spending countless hours starring at those two images and re-living him through them.

As an educated artist specialised in multimedia production, Žuljević came up with the idea to use his expertise in animation and drawing to ignite the moment of life into the motionless image of his father. He produced a simple hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation drawing upon the image that he had of his father when he served in Yugoslav People’s Army. In this brief animation, which he named Trapped in a Loop, the man on the picture, otherwise static, makes a turn and looks at the observer, and repeats. ⁸ Žuljević used art to create new memories of the person who is not there anymore to make his own. In the caption, he elaborates the symbolism of this animation:

This repetitive animation of my father mirrors the many times I have told and re-told the same stories about him, to the point where they feel distant and impersonal after a while. I evoke the life of my father and his physicality through the animation, reviving him, but only in the confines of a looped movement symbolic of my limited memory and the passing of time. (Žuljević, 2021)

After 7 years, Žuljević made another piece, this time a compendium of highly realistic animations based on the photographs of his father throughout his life: at the beach, in the office, as a child and a teenager on the motorcycle – revisiting his whole existence. The background sound in the animation is, as Žuljević (2021) notes, composed of calculated frequencies based on the measurements of the room where his dad died, in combination with his father’s distorted voice captured on a video home system (VHS) cassette and extended to create an eerie ambiance. ⁹ Each animation is characterised by a riveting gaze of Žuljević’s father that locks with the viewer’s, and by the movements of his lips: pursed, curling into a grin, a frown. Almost like this time Žuljević tried to make him communicate, add more depth to his (once-)existence, and make him more ‘alive’ in his memories – just like Hasija did, by requesting from a photo editor to add shadows behind her brothers in the collage.

The series of animations is interspersed with images of the background surroundings, such as the scene of warm pink sea or the camping site, imparted with subtle movements and sense of tranquillity achieved through luminism, pastel tones and faded analogue effect. The serenity captured through these animations in combination with the haunting sound is evocative of otherworldly qualities, almost as if he was picturing his father in the imagined ‘Hereafter’ – or rather ‘Thereafter’, as Žuljević named the piece.

In her seminal study Animated Documentary, describing the evocative function of the animated memories, Annabelle Honess Roe (2013) argues that ‘it is through this inarticulable and individual process of evocation and imagination that the animated documentaries [discussed here] do their most interesting work to convey subjective experiences that are irreducible to language or image’ (p. 137). Indeed, both Hasija’s and Enes’ examples of reshaping archived reality and extracting the most out of the fragments of their residual memory material through their creative efforts demonstrate the constructive process of translating the ‘unspeakable’ into the tangible and viable healing modality.

Another parallel that can be drawn between their two examples of visually driven memory work is that both Hasija and Enes did not stop at their initial creative outputs, but rather strove to perfect them and blur the lines between reality and imagination; in other words, to make their re-imag(in)ed memories ‘more real’. The result was turning the handmade collage into the digitally manipulated image that binds two of Hasija’s brothers into the shared moment of togetherness, and on Enes’ side, it was stepping-up from frame-by-frame hand-drawn animation into the video series that capture the subtleties of smile, expressions and micro-movements of his father, from the portrait pictures.

In efforts to (never) forget

In her book Missing: persons and politics, Jenny Edkins (2003) suggested that there are two possible responses to the tragedies that befell people: the first one being ‘refusal of memory’ through which traumatic memory is denied or even rationalised, and the second one, that she called ‘encircling of trauma’, which refers to a refusal to forget the painful past, and one’s insistence on its acknowledgement. These processes are quite observable in surviving families’ varied responses to the absence of family members, in terms of privacy of remembrance and controlled exposure to recalling cues in their immediate environment – especially when they are far removed from the original traumascapes (cf. Tumarkin, 2005). Only when the death is reassembled from the fragments retrieved from the mass graves and resurrected into the ‘once person(hood)’ (Edkins, 2011), the surviving families may allow themselves to immure their beloved ones to the shrine of memory.

Survivor’s revulsion to visual reminders of their tragic loss sometimes hides their denial of the fact that their loved ones are not returning – at least not alive. On the contrary, for others, the visual confrontation with the photography of a missing relative feels like revisiting the moment of making peace with their harrowing demise over and over again. Samira, the lead advocate of one of the women survivors’ associations in northwestern Bosnia, described this contested relation to the photographic reminders of the missing relatives:

We all live in and are entrapped in some kind of . . . Some women don’t like talking about them (missing), men are generally more closed, and while some women say ‘I don’t have pictures at all, I don’t look at them. I hid them all’, others place them all around the house, so that wherever she turns, she sees the picture.

In fact, putting the image on the visible spot confirms the loss, which the absence of a body had justified for too long as uncertain, partial and open to possibilities. Confronting the mortality contained in the image (Barthes, 1982) symbolises one’s determination to move on and outgrow the loss. This process can be constructive, as we saw from Hasija’s case, where she creatively used images to (re-)order her remembrances, visualising the ones that help her move on – the picture of her brothers together, side by side.

Our modern obsession with photography, notably for its core function to suspend the moment in time and save the memory from perishing, inherently hides our suppressed existential preoccupation with mortality, the death terror (cf. Becker, 1978). Renown theorists of photography, such as Susan Sontag (1982), Roland Barthes (1982) and Eduardo Cadava (1997) all averred that death is integral aspect of every photograph, for each snapshot of a person and frozen memory testify to its perishing nature, succumbing to eventual demise. Within the context of this article, we might draw a parallel between Cadava’s (1997: 13) quote, where: ‘In photographing someone, we know that the photograph will survive him – it begins, even during his life, to circulate without him, figuring and anticipating his death each time it is looked at’, and the case of the missing family members, where their photographs – which certainly outlived them – assume a plethora of meanings.

Photographs of the Bosniak disappeared do not ‘anticipate’ their return nor death, but they are weaponised against the genocidal death that targets both the destruction of the victims’ identities and their eradication from individual and collective memory (cf. Fournet, 2007). In this case, photographs simultaneously embody both: the memory ‘battlefield’, in sense that they serve as a site for resisting the genocidal destruction of memory of its victimised subjects, but also as a ‘weapon’, constantly reshaped, augmented and re-adapted to the changing dynamics of mnemonic processes.

The last example of visual reproduction of the image of the missing in the – quite literally ‘embodied’ – memory performance that I wish to discuss is the memorial tattoo art. Especially among the second – and the generation of children survivors (cf. Suleiman, 2002) of the Srebrenica Genocide, the practice of inscribing one’s body with the portraits of the family members that disappeared in the genocide has become widely practised, and deserves a study on its own (cf. Halilovich, 2013). The scarce family photographs are usually replicated on the body canvas of the surviving family members. Imprinting the name and the date of disappearance next to the tinted image of a perished father is fraught with powerful symbolism.

First and foremost, the permanency of the ink etched in the skin represents one’s lifelong commitment to ‘never forgetting’: the person on the image, nor the crime that defined the wearer’s fate and subsequent social belongingness – that of a genocide survivor. In that sense, the body art represents a very intimate archive of the loss for its wearer (cf. Halilovich, 2015b).

Second, the creative process of tattoo art, rooted in pain of needles that puncture the skin, tracing out the image of the person who was a target of erasure in every sense, is symbolic of the pain inflicted upon the victimised group to which the wearer belongs. The permanency of tattoo inkwork featuring the missing-dead embodies an antidote to the attempted erasure by the perpetrator group; not only of the collective of Bosniaks of Podrinje, but also of their individual identities from the collective memory (cf. Fournet, 2007). Moreover, the integrity of image imprinted on the body of its wearer reflects the integrity of relational loss to their sense of self, which is, quite concretely, legible in their very own body – the wearer’s DNA.

Finally, considering the context of the loved one’s absence of body, as a precursor to closure and healthy grieving outcome, the format of memorial tattoo art comes as powerful metaphor in negotiating the terms and conditions of the loved one’s death. Elizabeth Schiffrin (2009: 67) explains that

The practice of infusing symbolic meaning into a physical object – in this case the tattooed body of the bereaved – becomes a literal expression of the concept that the dead ‘live on’ through the lives, and in the bodies, of the bereaved

pointing out the role of memorial tattoo art in maintaining the ‘continuing bonds’ with the missing kin (cf. Klass et al., 1996). And for those who grew up in exile, the tattoo featuring a missing family member and a reference to the ‘municipal’ genocide – as is the case within the Bosnian context (cf. Halilovich, 2013a; Nuhanovic, 2022) – bears another layer of meaning: a reminder of one’s origins tied to the ancestral land from which they had been violently driven away.

During my ethnographic journey from Australia to the United States, I came across many walls, cabinets and ‘sleeveless arms’ inscribed with visual inklings to the memories of the missing that surviving families garner for what Halilovich (2011: 11) called ‘private museums and monuments to their loss’. For others, these mementos – such as photos, personal effects, DNA reports and such – are reposited in the secret archives, as for some, like my participant Subha, brushing their gaze against the painful reminders of loss and trauma on daily basis poses rather a detriment.

However, as we could see from the presented findings, the versatility of photographs that allows them to be manipulated and re-imag(in)ed, makes space for multi-layered meaning-making and ingress to past from different perspectives. Exactly this quality of photography is what makes it an empowering medium in contextualising the narratives of loss and in preserving the continuous bonds with the deceased (Jiménez-Alonso and Brescó de Luna, 2022). I suggest that by looking at these creative and constructive practices of safekeeping the memories of the lost loved ones, we can observe the traditional trajectory of grief, marked by ‘[. . .] An active effort to reaffirm or construct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss’ (Sands et al., 2012), but also discern the healing modality of photography as a mnemonic device that enables us to access the past.

Instead of closure

With the present article, I sought to demonstrate how the memories of the missing Bosniak men are fostered and re-enacted in the intimacy of everyday lives of the surviving family members. In this article, I explored the creative processing of photography within the memory (art)work. I based my analysis on the three commemorative image phenomena: photo collage, animation and tattoo art, through which I illustrated how the creative capacity of photography is deployed to re-invigorate and expand the memories of the perished kin. Using example of collage-making from the photos of the missing relatives, I theorised the re-ordering of memories through creative manipulation of an image as a metaphor for making sense out of ambiguity of the loss. I argued that the widely present practice among the surviving family members of the persons who disappeared in the genocide against Bosniaks has important function in the process of coming to terms with the disappearances, in sense that it symbolically instils a sense of control over the narrative of familial loss.

In conjunction with the practice of collage-making, I discussed another visually driven memory work by drawing upon the example of young Bosniak artist who used the format of animation to revive the memories of his father who was also killed in the Bosnian War. I analysed two of his work series and the evolving concept of photo-animation, emphasising the value of recorded memories through which surviving family members re-live their missing ones. I conceptualised these creative expressions as constructive processes of translating the ‘unspeakable’ into the tangible healing modalities that help us maintain the continuing bonds with the deceased. In that context, I also reflected on the practice of memorial artwork that also draws upon the image of the missing in its performative format. I discussed the plethora of meanings embedded within the tattoo art and its commemorative value.

To close, I discussed the polarised approach to visually cued remembering of the Bosniak missing in relation to emotional capacity of survivors to deal with re-living the trauma and moral dilemma of moving on in the face of ambiguity. I analysed these polarities by drawing upon theories of mortality embedded within a photography and its weaponisation against the genocidal intent to erase both the materiality of victims and their immaterial presence within the collective memory. I argued that the photograph is a par excellence tool in countering the genocidal damage within the realm of memory exactly for its creative capacity to be reframed, augmented, revived and modified. Finally, I argue that more scholarly attention should be devoted to investigation of openings within and the creative use – and potentially abuse – of photographs within the context of remembering (and forgetting) the genocide and its legacies.