Statement by the photographer, Misha PIPERCIC
"'Once, When We Were Happy' is my first photography book. The book is autobiographic work. It is about my family, it is about Sarajevo; city where I was born, about Bosnia, about non existing Yugoslavia, about dementing mother, about living as a refugee, about emotions, about surviving, about past, present, future, fears, about understanding and not understanding, about consequence of the war, about not forgetting dear people, about wounds and healing. But, the red line is LOVE." (© Misha PIPERCIC)
Background information
"I took up photography, rather late in life, I needed to express myself. In October 1991 my friend Goran Milošević and I came to The Netherlands by chance. Perhaps I had a premonition that war was coming to Sarajevo, the city where I had been living. Later, my brother Dragan (who was suffering from severe depression and took his own life in 1994, 21 years old), my girlfriend Vesna and Goran’s girlfriend Zorica joined Amsterdam the following January. After the war, my parents left Sarajevo and moved to The Netherlands, where they were granted political asylum. Among the belongings they brought with them were our family photograph albums. One day I caught my mother absent-mindedly writing names on to the prints themselves, and in order to save the images. I decided to scan them with the idea to preserve our family history, as a memoir for my children. But as I looked at them he realized that the pictures had value, not just for my family but also more generally. Those photographs were historical records of a country, a civilisation, a community which no longer existed and of a political idea that may has been banished from Europe for good." (excerpt from the text by Misha PIPERCIC, you can more read below)
Book review, content, print details
"Although Misha PIPERCIC has used various photo jargons in his earlier works such as Poetic Photography, Photojournalism and First Person Documentary, he has clearly chosen the documentary approach for the Bosnia project 'Once, When We Were Happy'. His strong sense of detail makes 'Once, When We Were Happy' very touching and is the main feature of the photo documentary." (freely translated, © Maartje van den Heuvel)
"Misha PIPERCIC asked me – as a sociologist – to say something about his book 'Once, When We Were Happy'. Naturally I was honoured, but I was also a bit unsure. Because who am I to say something about photography? And what could I possibly say about the impressive way in which he manages to generate so much emotion with photographs and few words? But as a scientist I am constantly trying to distance myself from subjects close to me, subjects I sometimes know well, in order to analyze them, dissect them, and look at them as objectively as possible. I think photography is inherently subjective, yet I still want to try and take a bit of distance here and look at the book from a sociological perspective.
'Once, When We Were Happy' starts halfway through Misha PIPERCIC's life story – at the moment he arrives in the Netherlands, and on the eve of war in Yugoslavia. In sociological terms we would talk about Misha’s life course, which not only refers to the different stages of life, from birth to death, but sees an individual’s life as inseparable from their social, cultural and historical context. A life course is marked by trajectories and transitions - in which we say goodbye to a certain role and take on a different role or roles. For example, the transition from youth to adulthood, or in this case, the rather sudden transition from the role of young man in Sarajevo, to that of adult migrant in a foreign country, one who is forcibly confronted with war, and everything that comes along with it.
In the introduction Misha PIPERCIC writes that he wanted to save his family pictures because he realized that they were of value. Not just to his family, but in a broader sense. As a sociologist, I would argue that most of the things we value in life (such as what family means to us, or what it means to be a father or mother, or how we look at friendship) - is a 'social construction.' When something is a social construction that means our perspective is partly determined by the time and culture in which we live. A life course is also a social construction - it takes shape in a given social, cultural and historical context. His life course, but also the life courses of the people depicted in his book, are shaped by the socio-cultural norms and values of a Yugoslavia before and after the war, just as his life course is shaped by the socio-cultural norms of being an outsider following his emigration to the Netherlands. When I look at the pictures in this book, I see people captured at one moment in time, in their own country. And I try to think of what it must be like to live your life in that context, a context of war, distrust, social inequality, poverty, sadness. That certainly evokes a lot of emotion in me.
In looking at the pictures by Misha PIPERCIC, I am aware that the value that we, as readers, attach to the pictures in his book, is partly determined by our own life course - the generation in which we were born, where, and how we grew up. Which means that my perspective - despite the fact that I have been living in the Netherlands for almost 20 years – is shaped by being an American woman who grew up in the Midwest of the US during the 1970s. And I look at these images and see not only sadness and loss, but also strength, and hope. I think that other people here today - young people, older people, Dutch people, Yugoslavs (for as much as you can still talk about a Yugoslavian culture) - value or give meaning to various images, scenes and moments depicted in the book in their own way.
At the same time, I think that he, as a photographer, manages to take the viewer - the reader – with him to the time and place (and therefore the value) of the photograph itself. The value of the people, buildings, and images of the past and present depicted in the photos. Misha PIPERCIC has the talent to make his perspective as a photographer – the perspective of someone who grew up in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and later emigrated to the Netherlands in the early 1990s - our perspective. And that’s one of the things that makes his book so unique.
The title 'Once, When We Were Happy' suggests there was a period in the life courses of the people depicted in the book when they were actually happy. And that that’s no longer the case. At the end of the book, the text 'Were Happy' suggests the opposite. But it’s at this point in the book that the viewer becomes aware that the life courses of the people in Bosnia today are not something that can be taken for granted. And that he - as a migrant returning to his homeland with a camera in hand - is confronted with a socio-cultural image that is, for all intents and purposes, now only partly his own. There is, however, a theme in the book that softens the harsher edges of this view, one which also plays an important role at the end of his book: family. The value we attach to family, the expectations we have of each other - that is also a social construction. What we can conclude at the end of the book is that for Misha PIPERCIC, family means a lot. In this story, family is something that connects, that gives hope, that brings joy. The portraits of his family at the end of the book are evidence of that: his great love Vesna, and his three children: Igor, Filip, and Ana." (text from the book presentation, © Mara Yerkes, an American sociologist)
About the Bosnian photographer, Misha PIPERCIC (b. 1968 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Photo books by Misha PIPERCIC
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Detailed text by Misha PIPERCIC
“I took up photography, rather late in life. I had a need to express myself. I arrived in Holland with my friend Goran Milošević, by chance, in October 1991. Perhaps I had a premonition that war was coming to Sarajevo, the city where I had been living. My brother Dragan, my girlfriend Vesna and Goran’s girlfriend Zorica joined us in Amsterdam the following January. Things were tough, we lived in squats and had no income. In April 1992, the war descended on Sarajevo. Vesna’s family home was burnt down in May; shortly afterwards her father Vojin died in a Sarajevo hospital. Every day seemed to bring more bad news. The one bright spot was the birth of our son Igor Vojin on 13 April, 1993. Many of our friends and family members were killed, severely wounded or lost their homes. Then on 5 November, 1994, my brother Dragan, who was suffering from severe depression, took his own life. He was only 21.
After the war, my parents left Sarajevo and moved to The Netherlands, where they were granted political asylum. Among the belongings they brought with them were our family photograph albums. The pictures had mostly been taken during summer holidays, when we would go to the coast or visit our relatives in the countryside, on New Year’s Eve, at weddings, birthdays, or when our relatives from other towns, the countryside or from abroad came to visit. At first I could not bring myself to look at them – the memories were too painful. But one day I caught my mother absent-mindedly writing names on to the prints themselves, and in order to save the images I decided to scan them. I suppose my original idea was to preserve our family history, a memoir for my children. But as I looked at them I realised that the pictures had value, not just for my family but also more generally. Those photographs were historical records of a country, a civilisation, a community which no longer existed and of a political idea that may have been banished from Europe for good.
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Both my parents were born into poor peasant families with many children. My mother Petra, née Ristić, was born in the village of Tolisa, in north Bosnia, my father Radovan in Vrane, a village in West Serbia. In the Fifties, the postwar reconstruction and development of the new socialist state of Yugoslavia was underway. Hundreds of large factories were built, providing employment for tens of thousands of workers and prompting construction of new residential areas for those workers. One such factory was 'Famos', (the Engine Factory Sarajevo), and one such residential area was Hrasnica. The 'Famos 'factory was on the outskirts of Sarajevo, between the Muslim villages of Hrasnica and Lasica, and the Serbian villages Grlica and Vojkovići. It was not uncommon then for new industrial and residential developments to be located in ethnically mixed areas, underpinned by the socialist ideal of brotherhood and unity. The result was much intermarriage. Mass voluntary labour built the country’s infrastructure, from factories, residential areas, roads, railroads and irrigation systems to brand new cities and seaside and mountain resorts for the young socialists and their typically two-child families. This industrialization was in full swing during the Fifties and scores of hopeful young people left their villages and moved to towns for education and work, my parents included. After finishing his military service, my father joined his elder brothers, Ventislav and Miodrag, in Sarajevo. Ventislav would later emigrate to Australia, and Miodrag to the United States. Мy mother moved first to Tuzla, where her elder sister Marija lived, and then to Sarajevo to live with her brother Stevo, who was a policeman in Ilidža and Hrasnica.
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The first photograph of my parents was taken in 1966, at the restaurant in the Hrasnica cultural centre. They married the following year and had their first seaside holiday together. My father worked from 7am to 3pm, and my mother from 1pm to 9pm. Alongside his work, his political engagements and obligations at home, my father had managed to finish law school. My mum, on the other hand, never much cared for school and she worked as a cleaner and in a packaging department, packing car parts.
I was born on 27 June, 1968, the day the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and my brother Dragan on 24 February, 1972. He grew up to be a good man, honest and kind, people liked him and he liked to joke. We rarely talk about Dragan. Each year, on his birthday and on the anniversary of his death, we go to church, we light a candle and say a prayer. Before, mum used to light a candle for his soul each day. Nowadays, she often sighs and says 'what befell my Dragan?'When we were small, Dragan and I were looked after by our cousin Nada. After she married and moved to Borovo in Croatia, and we moved to Proleterska Street, our neighbour Bosiljka looked after us. Socialising was always very important for my parents and I can hardly recall a day when we did not have someone visiting.
But during the war this changed and people would rarely visit each other. It seemed everyone was preoccupied with their own problems. Many family relationships and friendships were broken, in my family and in many other families from the former Yugoslavia. Some relationships broke down during the war when relatives ended up on different sides, others after the war, be it as a result of the stresses of war, grudges or short temper.
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As I scanned the photos of the past, I conceived the idea to put together a book of photographs as a follow-up or supplement to our family album. The book would bring together contemporary photos of the people featured in the family album who were still alive ‒ for example, my aunts, cousins, friends and neighbours. It would also include photographs of familiar places. With that in mind, the first place I returned to was Tolisa, the village where my mother grew up. I took photographs of my relatives and the village, as well as the surrounding villages and towns. In Modria – and probably in Gradačac too – there were equal numbers of prewar residents and postwar refugees.
Next I went to Sarajevo accompanied by my father. He met with his old friends, some of them for the last time. We went to visit some of his friends together, so I photographed them.
I also took photos of Hrasnica, the Sarajevo suburb where we used to live, and the Famos factory complex which had once employed ten thousand people, including half of Hrasnica’s residents. Nearly all its buildings had been destroyed. What remained of this former industrial giant now housed a few hundred small private businesses in barely refurbished premises. Hrasnica itself was in a very poor state, with innumerable residential buildings damaged in the war.
Visits to our old neighbours and friends were very emotional and heart-warming. Whomever we visited, even when we turned up on the doorstep unannounced, greeted us as their nearest and dearest. But too many were in poor health, physically, and some also mentally. All invariably served us a meal and suggested we stayed overnight. Vojo Kruni made us a bowl of salad and sliced up a salami, which we munched on while sipping his finest schnapps. Ilija Miščević cooked us leek soup, Aunt Boriška made Hungarian goulash, and our friend Jelena served us roast chicken with potatoes. It was painful to see cousin Boriša, aged 55, who was unemployed and living with his mother. The two of them survived on her pension of 300 Bosnian convertible marks (about €150). Four years later, on 11 June, 2018, Boriša died aged 59. Ilidža was another suburban area I revisited. This was where Vesna and I had kissed for the first time. We would often stroll along the tree-lined path from Ilidža to the source of the River Bosna, the two of us alone on the deserted road.
In November 2014, I was photographing that same path. It was exactly as I remembered it – nostalgic and romantic at the same time. How beautiful, I thought.But my reverie was rudely interrupted. I had spotted a horse and cart in the distance, and then a man and a woman approached on foot. When they were just few steps away, the man said: “Have I improved your photo?” I thought he was joking, but then he launched into a barrage of insults and curses. Where did all that anger come from? Is it possible that he was suspicious of my photographing him and that had set him off? Such words and reactions were never rare in Bosnia, but that does not make them right.
Once, I was invited to photograph a refugee centre in north Bosnia. Its residents were homeless people unable to look after themselves. Some had been there for twenty years. There were no showers and the rooms were small and squalid. Tešo, one of the residents, had stepped on a mine during the war and lost a leg. A few months ago he had a heart attack, and shortly after that a stroke. He is expected to pay for his medication himself. How? A couple of residents at the centre suffer from mental illnesses. It is a miracle there is anyone who does not, given their situation.
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Six months after the 2014 floods, which ravaged parts of Bosnia, I took pictures of the River Bosna near Doboj. The river was full of rubbish and the branches of overhanging trees were ‘decorated’ with plastic bags. The locals no longer seem to notice such ugly sights. It has almost become normal to dump a plastic bag or a broken TV set into the river. Frustration runs high and no one seems to care about the common good anymore. And dogs? Do dogs live better than people in Bosnia? I didn’t think they did. Everywhere I went, I saw dogs roaming in packs and dead puppies by the side of the road. One of the residents at the refugee centre claimed that the government had allocated 8 million marks to build a dog shelter. ‘And look how we live!’ he said." (© Misha PIPERCIC)
- Book design
- Sybren (SYB) KUIPER
- Format
- HC (no dust jacket, as issued), 16 x 24 x 2 cm., 162 pp., 142 color & b/w ills., tetx language: English, Ltd. to 500 numbered copies, Munken Krystal Rough 150 grs.