A Balkan Journey
Chris Leslie
Street Level Photoworks
Now a respected documentary photographer, Chris Leslie’s career began as the result of a convoluted accident whilst volunteering in Croatia in 1996. After lying on his CV about being interested in photography, he was drafted into running photography classes for children in the town of Pakrac, as part of NGO work continuing in the wake of the 1995 Dayton Agreement. This experience marked the beginning of his 25 year long work in the region, collected alongside writing by John McDougall as A Balkan Journey.
Like Leslie’s 2016 Disappearing Glasgow, A Balkan Journey is a personal and subtly political book. Both are concerned with the rebuilding of place, the people who are left adrift in states of reconstruction. The book’s first images, from Leslie’s initial placement in a town estimated to be 85% destroyed by the Bosnian war, make up a sparse townscape: abandoned houses and tower blocks; church spires held up with rickety scaffolds; a statue of Jesus on the cross with a bullethole in his cheekbone, a semi-ironic analogy of insult to injury. Sporadic among these quiet ruins are lone children, animals, and foreign workers.
The next set is more filled with life. Here are photographs of another group of children Leslie taught, from an orphanage described as ‘the worst place in Sarajevo apart from the morgue’. These ‘camera kids’ pose for each other in groups acting tough or goofy, next to a wall covered in graffitied names—two deft images of humanity clinging together and documenting moments of joy. Leslie is interested in this post-conflict grey area. In early ’00s Kosovo, families stand in doorways of still-battered homes with enigmatic, conflicting expressions. Laminated portraits of two dozen men are attached to a fence, alongside a banner that reads ‘WE ARE MISSING THEM’. It’s not certain whether these men are dead, displaced, or psychologically absent—a poignant suggestion of the multitudinous human destruction of war, and the long, complex loneliness that follows.
In a section marking 20 years since the end of the war, the best images are bold photographs of apartments, stylised graffiti and colour-blocked buildings in Kosovo. This aesthetic shift echoes quotes from young people who feel their generation represents a break from nationalist attitudes. But it’s not a cut-and-dry ending—McDougall’s epilogue notes the connections between Serbia and present-day far-right activity, alongside Leslie’s final images of Tito’s nuclear bunker, recently uncovered and eerily intact. Glossy photography books from war-torn nations can be absurd in their contrasts, but A Balkan Journey is carried by Leslie’s genuine connection to the area and its people, going beyond the typical remove of the documentarian, whilst only occasionally lapsing into sentimentality.
—Claire Biddles