After eight hour train journey from Banja Luka to Mostar via Sarajevo, pulled by a train engine on which it said ‘Republika Srpska Rails’ and upon arriving to Mostar the engine has become ‘Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Rails’ I arrived to a depressing looking train station in Mostar and was picked up by an Orthodox priest and his priest trainee (also a Theology student). {Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into two parts Republika Srpska and the Federation – sounding like something from the star wars. Even my train ticket had a different pricing for different ‘entities’ as they call them.}
When we spoke on the phone prior to meeting at the station the priest described himself as wearing the priest robes (at which point I didn’t bother giving him my description) as it definitely wasn’t difficult to recognise him in long black cloak, and a black cap. It took us an hour on a windy road up a mountain to reach Nevesinje, a small town where he lived with his family (Orthodox priests can merry), running an Orthodox church. I was so intrigued about their lives, having grown up in the socialist Yugoslavia, and not having much contact with religion. (I remember as a child staying with my mother’s family in Croatia and thinking that God only existed there as they were the only people I knew who went to church and who had the scary looking pictures of angels and other dramatic looking characters.) So we chatted rather informally in the car, me quizzing them about priesthood, them describing me their ‘career’ paths, of studying Theology, which lasts four years, then one can do Masters etc etc and e.g for four years one of the subjects is a History of Religion and even though they primarily train to be priests in the Orthodox tradition, they for example learn about Islam for an academic year and so on. They dropped me off to a private accommodation where I was to stay with a family, who run a sort of B&B, or village tourism.
The priest told me of a two women who agreed to be photographed, and accompanied by a driver, a priest assistant and dodgy old golf (now that’s what I call doing the fieldwork in style) we set off the following day to our first visit. Ljubica lived in Nevesinje, and we were welcomed by her and her daughter. I negotiated where we should take photographs, and managed to convince her to take them in her bedroom, as there were five people in the by now very smokey living room (it never ceases to amaze me how much people smoke here – a friend in Banja Luka told me it is the curse of the third world countries).
I always leave to the women to arrange how they want to present the clothes; it is their personal choice how they spread it out and nearly everyone immediately has their own notion of how they like it to be arranged for photographing.
I am forever plagued by the questions of ethics as this practice of entering personal places and ‘taking’ a photograph is on some level exploitative and I am constantly asking myself if I have explained correctly what the photograph is for, and even though I do ask for signatures on a model release form, a sense of having taken something away stays with me.
After the first visit we drove another half an hour to the village nearby, accompanied by a daughter of the second woman who agreed to be photographed. There, we were offered a coffee, which I must not drink anymore as it is so strong and black that couple of those a day and my heart begins to jump a beat. The family lived in a basic village condition, growing their own food and I thought it was interesting that in the UK I pay so much money for the organic food and farming in the organic way has become a bit of a middle class thing – thinking here of that programme, was it on the BBC about a young couple running their organic farm, he reminded me a bit on Jamie Oliver, and the whole series had this sexy farming message written all over it.
I will write more again, as I try to catch up on the last week…but right now I am going to catch up on much needed sleep!
