WHEN Chris Leslie first arrived in Sarajevo in the autumn of 1996 the city was enjoying its newfound peace.
“Sarajevans took to its scarred streets in huge numbers,” he recalls, “meeting with friends and drinking coffee safe in the knowledge they wouldn’t be struck down by a sniper or shell.”
Even so, it was hard to forget that the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina had spent most of the previous four years under siege from the Bosnian Serb army and that more than 13,000 people had been killed in that time. Tragically many, many more were killed in the wider conflict that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Leslie took a photograph of Una Mesic outside the bombed-out parliament building in Sarajevo in 1998. “It’s hard to talk about justice when there are a lot of mothers in Bosnia still searching for the bones of their children,” she told him.
Leslie, a psychology and politics graduate from Airdrie, began travelling to the Balkans in 1996. Over 25 years he has built up a library of photographs that capture a place and a time that he has gathered into a book, A Balkan Journey, and now an exhibition that has just opened in Glasgow.
Given the growing tensions in the region here is a reminder of the cost of past conflicts and the peace that might be lost.
Chris Leslie’s Balkan Journey Exhibition is at SOGO Arts, Glasgow, until February 28. A limited-edition book of his work is available from balkanjourney.com
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