A few steps from the idyllic Dubrovnik Stradun, in one of the side streets, is the War Photo Limited gallery. On the first level, there is an exhibition of photographs taken during the civil war in Burma. On the second, there is an exhibition The end of Yugoslavia with some of the most famous works of Ron Haviv and other famous photographers who visited Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo in the nineties. There is also an impressive retrospective of Serbian photographer Goran Tomašević (see "Vreme" December 28, 2020), who has been visiting battlefields and conflict zones for 30 years, from Haiti through Syria and Libya to the Central African Republic and Burundi.
Working for the Reuters agency, Goran Tomasevic has been documenting conflicts around the world with a camera for more than 20 years. He also photographed the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 and the World Cup in Germany in 2006, but his images from crisis areas around the world won all the most important photography awards. He started his professional career in 1991 working for the daily newspaper "Politika". He soon became an external associate of the Reuters agency, and also worked for the "Belgrade Chronicle". He photographed the war that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, he went to Bosnia and Croatia. He became a Reuters photojournalist in 1996 and has remained with them to this day. Since 1997, he has been photographing the war in Kosovo and the anti-Milosevic protests in Belgrade. During the three-month NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Tomasevic was the only photographer who worked for the foreign press and who spent the entire duration of the conflict in Kosovo.
"Danger cannot be measured, wherever shooting is not easy and there were many dangerous moments. The first thing I learned was in Kosovo and Metohija, where it was very dense. Why am I here if not to paint, because if I don't paint, then I have no reason to be in a war conflict... It is very important to stay sober, because if you are not sober, you are dangerous for yourself and for others, and that is the secret above the secrets of this craft," he said. After those events in the Balkans, Reuters sends him to the Middle East. He moved to Jerusalem and stayed there for four years. During the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, his image of a US Marine watching the demolition of a statue of Saddam Hussein became one of the most memorable images of the war. All the world's leading newspapers published her on the front page and she is the record holder for the number of front pages with more than 160 in a row.
photo: goran tomašević...
Tomasevic's photograph of the wounding of an American sergeant in Afghanistan has become an iconic image in American war history. It is now in the US War Photography Museum.
After photographing him, Tomasevic helped the wounded sergeant.
"He lost consciousness from the detonation and when he came to, he asked me for a cigarette and to see the photos. When my boss, Mr. Steve Crisp, saw what I had photographed, he called me and said - come back!", Tomasevic said.
He moved to Cairo in 2006 and was at the center of Reuters coverage of the Arab Spring. In Libya, his image of a fireball fired after an airstrike on pro-Gaddafi fighters became an icon of the Libyan war, appearing on more than 100 front pages around the world. His images of rebel fighters battling pro-Assad forces amid the ruins of Aleppo and Damascus during Syria's civil war won international acclaim, as did his coverage of the bloody siege of a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya.
Tomašević worked in Reuters offices in Jerusalem, Cairo and Nairobi. He currently lives in Istanbul and is the chief photographer of the Reuters agency.
photo: goran tomašević...AND HIS WORKS: Exhibits from the Goran Tomašević exhibition
He received many prestigious international awards. He has been named Reuters Photographer of the Year a record four times (2003, 2005, 2011 and 2013) and won the agency's Photo of the Year Award in 2008. In 2009, the Asia Publishers Association, based in Hong Kong, presented him with an Award for Excellence in News Photography, and in 2014 he received the first World Press Award. In 2013, the "Guardian" newspaper chose him as the best newspaper photographer in the world. In 2019, he received the highest prize - the Pulitzer - for a poignant photo in which a rooster passes by a boy who died in a fight with gangs in Honduras. The jury awarded it for "a vivid and stunning visual story about the importance, desperation and sadness of migrants as they traveled to the US from Central and South America".
The award-winning photo was created as part of a photo project that followed the wave of migrants from Central and South America to the USA, in August 2018 in San Pedro Sula, the city with the highest number of murders in the world. Tomašević visited Honduras twice in order to show through his lens the society there, where drugs dominate, and he also photographed the criminal gangs that control most of Latin America. In June 2018, he went to Mexico and Honduras for the first time, where he convinced criminals to agree to be photographed, which was not easy at all. However, he was not satisfied with his work, so he returned in August. The award-winning photo was taken during his second stay in Honduras, after a showdown between two rival gangs warring over cocaine-selling territory.
Elem, if your trip takes you to Dubrovnik, you can see Goran Tomašević's retrospective exhibition until October 31 of this year.
While I was going to "Kamenice" for dinner and listening to the singing of the klapa that the Tourist Organization of Dubrovnik hired to create a "Mediterranean atmosphere" in the ancient city in the evening, I thought about how there is something poetic in the fact that right here, on Stradun, which in 1991 was targeted by the Montenegrin reservists of the JNA and the troops of Bože Vučurević from the surrounding hills, I look at the exhibition of a Belgrader who dedicated his life to reporting with just such places. And Dubrovnik was big enough that despite the traumatic past and the current "right turns" of Croatian society, there is no problem with the "geographic origin" of the authors of these photos.
After returning from Dubrovnik, I talked with several colleagues about Tomašević's powerful work.
"When Politica was deciding whether to hire him permanently, it was judged that he was not good enough for them and another colleague, close to the ruling party at the time, was hired," a colleague, a witness of those events, told me.
Goran then got a permanent job at Reuters and won the "Pulitzer". Little satisfaction for the fact that there is no sentence in the biography that he was permanently employed in the oldest Serbian daily newspaper.
