Arts <\/p>\n
For Ziyah Gafi\u0107, documentary photography begins with access. The Sarajevo-based photojournalist has spent more than two decades recording what remains after violence \u2014 from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Muslim communities in Palestine and Pakistan. For Gafi\u0107, a camera does more than register a scene. It lets a photographer cross the threshold into another person\u2019s experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt allows you to be in places where you are usually not invited,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said in an interview with The Crimson. \u201cIt\u2019s like a permanent invitation to other people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gafi\u0107 began taking photographs as a teenager, interning at a local magazine during the final months of the Bosnian War. He had no formal photographic training and later studied comparative literature, an education that gave him a vocabulary for constructing stories across a different medium.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy studying comparative literature, you\u2019re exposed to this variety of different ways to tell stories \u2014 from Eastern traditions to Anglo-Saxon and different canons of storytelling \u2014 which, with a little bit of imagination, you can apply to photography,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said. \u201cBecause photography, be that documentary or fact-based photography or any other genre, is storytelling.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stories available to Gafi\u0107 were inseparable from Sarajevo, where the war began when he was 12. He resists reducing those years to a single register. Alongside daily danger, Gafi\u0107 remembers the unusual liberties of adolescence during wartime. What endured most clearly wasn\u2019t one image or episode, but a way of seeing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think war experience \u2014 be that one day at war or four years \u2014 shapes your worldview,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said. \u201cAt least in my case. And I think that\u2019s more important than anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1999, at 19, Gafi\u0107 traveled to Kosovo as the Kosovo War escalated into a humanitarian crisis. It was his first assignment abroad for the independent Bosnian news magazine where he worked at the time. He persuaded the editor that photographs from their own reporter would distinguish the magazine from competitors using the same wire-service images. The trip brought him a network of international workers he knew from Bosnia and, after he returned, an illness that took months to recover from. It also clarified his ambition.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then I was like, \u2018Yeah, this is what I want to do.\u2019 I\u2019m saying this from the perspective of a 19-year-old. \u2018This is something I want to do, and these are the experiences I want to have,\u2019\u201d Gafi\u0107 said. \u201cThat was the reasoning back then. Admittedly, very simplistic, but it was in line with age and experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
That ambition developed into \u201cTroubled Islam: Short Stories from Troubled Societies,\u201d a long-term project about the aftermath of violence in predominantly Muslim communities. Built over roughly a decade in the post-9\/11 world, the series reached across Bosnia, Palestine, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Ossetia, Chechnya, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The completed work was exhibited at War Photo Limited in Dubrovnik in 2010 and published as a monograph of the same name.<\/p>\n
Rather than treating those societies as interchangeable, Gafi\u0107 used the project to compare how ordinary life persists after communities, rituals, and social structures have been torn apart. The point isn\u2019t to promise that one photograph can transform a life, but to build a record through accumulation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether that is going to have some result or impact on their immediate life and livelihood, that\u2019s a different conversation, but I\u2019m happy even if it\u2019s this tiny,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said. \u201cIt\u2019s the cumulative effect that I\u2019m interested in rather than the effect of a single action.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the photographic project \u201cQuest for Identity\u201d \u2014 began in 2010 and collected in a book published two years later \u2014 Gafi\u0107 turned from faces to objects. He set out to create a visual archive of every personal effect recovered with human remains from Bosnia\u2019s mass graves, part of the effort to account for the roughly 30,000 people who went missing as a consequence of the 1992\u20131995 Bosnian War. He photographed watches, keys, combs, glasses, toothbrushes, and other belongings that had been cleaned and catalogued for use in identifications and as evidence in war crimes trials.<\/p>\n
Against a clinical background, the objects become both an archive and portraiture. By removing the faces and surroundings that viewers might perceive as foreign, Gafi\u0107 sought to collapse the distance between viewer and victim through objects familiar enough to belong to almost anyone.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe bring the conversation down to symbols, which are arguably universal, and so it kind of levels the field and causes an emotional response, as it should,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said.<\/p>\n
Gafi\u0107 now directs the VII Foundation\u2019s work in Sarajevo, where the nonprofit offers tuition-free courses and workshops intended to cultivate new and underrepresented perspectives in visual journalism. His practice has expanded from making photographs to educating emerging visual journalists. For Gafi\u0107, teaching isn\u2019t separate from the ethics of representation. International journalism still shows much of the world through the perspectives of a comparatively narrow group. Training people closer to the communities being documented can begin to correct that imbalance.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn our professional careers as practitioners, we worked in most of the world, and we know that the world as we see it today in photography, in press, journalism, is largely represented by a certain class of people \u2014 people coming from certain countries or certain parts of the world \u2014 and a big part of the world is kind of excluded from that conversation, even though it concerns them the most,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said. \u201cSo we feel that putting a dent in that imbalance, in how the world is visually represented through education and training, is a moral thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
That concern with who represents conflict also informs \u201cImagine: Reflections on Peace,\u201d a multimedia project conceived by VII Foundation co-founder Gary Knight and producer Fiona Turner. For the exhibition now at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Gafi\u0107 joined Knight and Turner as a co-curator. The wider project follows six countries emerging from war, pairing archival reporting with contemporary work to ask why peace takes such different forms. The Weatherhead presentation focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cambodia, Colombia, and Lebanon.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea was also to try to understand why is it so hard to imagine peace? Why peace can\u2019t be just the absence of violence, which is a very common way to describe peace,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said. \u201cIt\u2019s also a very dry description of peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
Those questions will move from the gallery to the auditorium on Oct. 22. A public viewing at CGIS South will be followed by \u201cTestimony (1989\u20132026),\u201d the Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture by Ron Haviv, a fellow VII Foundation director and one of its co-founders. Drawing on more than three decades of work across Central America, the Balkans, the Arab Spring, Ukraine, and the United States, Haviv will consider the ethical, practical, and personal demands of bearing witness through visual journalism.<\/p>\n
That issue of ethics has become more urgent as generative artificial intelligence unsettles photography\u2019s old social contract. For Gafi\u0107, a camera could once be trusted to have registered something new. Now, it must return to the person behind the image. In an exhibition devoted to what happens after peacemakers and diplomats leave, Gafi\u0107\u2019s parting question turns the act of looking back toward the witness.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow more than ever, we trust sources, which are people, professionals. I think actually that\u2019s really beautiful. The technologies can never be out of the equation, but suddenly we made this full circle, and that focus is again on who is telling me this, or who is showing me that,\u201d Gafi\u0107 said.<\/p>\n
If photography is a permanent invitation into other people\u2019s lives, Gafi\u0107\u2019s work asks viewers to consider who is extending it.<\/p>\n
\u201cImagine: Reflections on Peace\u201d is on view at the CGIS South Building through Jan. 4.<\/p>\n