A haunting record of civil and political unrest in the former Yugoslavian states

Presenting three decades of work, Miro Kuzmanovic’s self-published monograph addresses the legacy of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, and how they have affected contemporary national identity

“Ethnicity was never an issue for me,” says self-taught documentary photographer Miro Kuzmanović. Born in Austria in 1976, he grew up in a multi-ethnic family. His father was originally from what is now Serbia, and part of his mother’s family belongs to the Ukrainian minority that migrated to the former Yugoslavia generations ago. “My parents came to Austria in the 60s,” says Kuzmanović. “They came to find work but never really planned to stay. That’s why I moved back to Yugoslavia with my mother and sisters when I was eight. My father stayed to work in Austria. Then, in 1991, when I was 16, the war started.”

For a decade from 1991, a series of wars saw the former Yugoslavia fracture through a chain of brutal ethnic conflicts and insurgencies across the region, including the Slovenian War of Independence, Croatian War of Independence, Bosnian War, and Kosovo War. One nation was divided into the individual states of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Slovenia, North Macedonia, and the partially recognised state of Kosovo. The ethnic wars started slowly, with Slovenia declaring independence in 1991. But by 1992, they had reached levels of a conflict that would eventually result in some 140,000 deaths, hundreds of mass graves and a major humanitarian crisis with thousands of displaced families. One of the most devastating massacres was the week-long Srebrenica genocide of 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys, killed by the Bosnian Serb Army in July 1995.

Kuzmanović was in high school in what is now Bosnia when the political situation began to deteriorate. At the age of 16, he was only two years away from being drafted into the military. “There were all these crazy guys coming back from the war and the first mass graves were being uncovered. There were [detention] camps 30 minutes from where I lived,” he recalls. “Everyone was drafted… and if you were drafted, you had to go. I knew if I had to join the military I would never get out. So we decided I would try to leave [in order not to be drafted].”

Kuzmanović caught a bus with his mother, and travelled out of the country through Bosnia, Serbia and Hungary. “They had checkpoints so you couldn’t easily leave, but I managed to sneak out and avoid military service.” As he departed, Kuzmanović photographed the scenes he witnessed from the bus window. Young soldiers, destroyed buildings, the everyday decline in civic society. His camera formed a barrier of sorts between him and the horrific reality that was unfolding on the ground. “It provided me with some distance to what was going on,” says Kuzmanović. “It was a protective layer.”

It was 1992 when he was eventually reunited with his father in Austria. “It sounds like a cliche,” he says, “but after Yugoslavia’s disintegration, I lost my identity.” He continues: “If there had been no war in Yugoslavia, I would have become an architect. Instead I became a photographer. I started photographing for newspapers and I tried to forget about the war.”

The conflict saw the worst human rights abuses in Europe since World War Two. To hold those responsible to account, the United Nations formed the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Though the tribunal was officially founded in 1993, the trials did not start properly until 2002 with that of Slobodan Milošević, a Yugoslav and Serbian politician. It was then that Kuzmanović too began revisiting the past. In 2008 he returned to the nascent states of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia to photograph what had become of the country he had left 16 years before. For the following decade, Kuzmanović embedded himself in society, documenting social, religious and political events across the former Yugoslavia.

The result is Signs by the Roadside, a new photobook that Kuzmanović self-published in late 2021 to critical acclaim; the publication made the final selection for the Encontros da Imagem Photobook Award, and the Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards. The monograph addresses the past, the present, and the legacy of the conflicts in former Yugoslavia, and how they have affected contemporary national identity. It is a multilayered book in which personal narratives, ethnic identities and political histories rub up against each other. These layers overlap and intertwine, hinting at how the traumas of the past are apparent in the memories of the present.

Signs by the Roadside comprises three main visual themes: the photographs from Kuzmanović’s first bus journey out of the country, screenshots from the ICTY trials, and the images that Kuzmanović made of life in the independent countries over the last decade. The ‘bus images’ are the rawest. The photographs are printed at the top of the page, with white space below. They capture parked tanks, burned-out buildings, very young soldiers, and street signs pointing the way to towns that would later be known as the sites of massacres. A sense of unease permeates the images. In some ways, they represent surveillance footage – snapshots caught on the fly through smeared windows, capturing old ladies and wary youths gazing at the bus that they are not getting on. But in the surrounding destruction, the military personnel, the guns, the artillery and the collapsed buildings, there are also undertones of the violence that is inundating everyday life. It was what Kuzmanović was escaping.

Then there are the screenshots of the ICTY trials, revealing images of some of the people responsible for the most grave atrocities of the war. One screenshot shows an image of a faceless man with his knees tucked up to his chest. His arms are tied and drawn upwards, while the end of the cord is held in the hands of another. It is an image that suggests torture and suffering. There are pictures of people like Radovan Karadžić, a former Bosnian Serb politician, convicted by the Hague court for crimes against humanity, and Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb colonel general ultimately responsible for the Srebrenica genocide. The men are shown playing chess together. There are also screenshots from inside the courtroom of lesser-known faces, and stills of suited, bound bodies, lying still on the floor. It is the banality and bureaucracy of evil, and the universally male faces of the perpetrators of this violence.

Kuzmanović gained access to the ICTY archives, enabling him to take these screenshots. “As I was making [the images], I realised that [the archive] was really essential. When I started going back to what was once Yugoslavia, everywhere I went, I had this footage in the news. It was like [watching] the weather. If you went to Serbia you’d see it, and if you went to Bosnia you’d see it. The same man who was a war criminal in Bosnia was a war hero in Serbia. The images can be read in different ways. It’s a collective memory.”

Yet the memory varies depending on which ‘side’ you are on. This idea of a division of memory is also apparent in the third layer of images; the pictures that Kuzmanović made when he started travelling to Bosnia, Serbia and the other nations of the former Yugoslavia in 2008. In this way, Kuzmanović familiarises us with life after the war. We see images of religious festivals, of military manoeuvres, of people watching football, and events celebrating the memory of Yugoslavia’s unaligned communist past. There are graveyards, soldiers and memorials to the victims of massacres. Different forms of banal nationalism blend as a multitude of soldiers, festivals, marches and political events merge.

An Unclear Truth

As an outsider, the overall feeling I get when looking through the book is one of a male-dominated, nationalist view. A group of hard-looking, short-haired men in leather jackets in one country is not so different to a group of hard-looking, short-haired men in leather jackets in another. Their values are the same, the country they associate them with is different. This blurring of the lines is compounded by Kuzmanović’s refusal to pin the images down with captions. “This work is about a personal encounter with my history and the history of former Yugoslavia,” he says. “As a photojournalist, you produce stories, and with that you have some sort of stand. That’s something I didn’t want to do with this book.” Instead, Kuzmanović says, “I wanted the viewer to make [their] own interpretation and reconstruct the reality of what’s going on.”

He adds: “By photographing in former Yugoslavia, I realised how fragile peace was 30 years after the Dayton Agreement [1995 peace accord between Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia that led to the end of the Bosnian War] and how present the idea of identity and ideology was. The more I dug into it, the fewer answers I got.” The lack of clarity is written into the visual narrative of the book. It does this similarly to Gilles Peress’ Telex Iran, a publication that is ostensibly about the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, but is also about the utter inability of Peress to understand what is happening around him as he photographs. Peress writes his shortcomings as a narrator into the book, and thereby questions the practice of photojournalism and news reporting.

In Kuzmanović’s book, the truth is unclear in places, but it is pinned down by the horrors of fact. Apart from one picture of a skeleton from a massacre site, there are no graphic images of violence. Paul Graham’s Troubled Land or Jens Liebchen’s Stereotypes of War work on similar principles of suggesting but not showing brutality, but Kuzmanović goes one step further to show what happens as a result of it; violence is suggested by rows of coffins and headstones, graveyards and mass funerals.

At the back of Signs by the Roadside there is a pamphlet with a series of texts. One is by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić. It details the experiences of those on trial at the ICTY in The Hague, as they live out their lives behind bars at Scheveningen prison. There are Serbs who massacred Muslim Bosniaks, there are Bosnians who tortured Serbs, there are Croats who killed Serbs. These are the people responsible for the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and for hundreds of thousands of war crimes. But in the confines of the prison, they cook together, they read Yugoslav newspapers together, and when one of them dies, they write letters of condolence to the man’s family.

Drakulić writes about their night-time routines and concludes, “Before falling asleep… none of them will think about the Scheveningen Paradox: the fact that, after all, it is actually a small version of Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavia of ‘brotherhood and unity’ still exists, albeit only in prison… But if ‘brotherhood and unity’ among the sworn enemies of yesterday is the epilogue of this war, then why did all of this happen? Looking at the cheerful guys at the Scheveningen custody, the answer is clear: for nothing.”

Signs by the Roadside by Miro Kuzmanovic is self-published.