The third episode of the second season of the documentary series “The Story Behind the Photo”, which is part of the “Sniper Alley Photo” project, has been published. The new episode features a TV and film cameraman from the United Kingdom (UK) David Barker, who worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during the siege of Sarajevo in 1994 on a five-part documentary series called ‘Siege Doctors’.
“The Story Behind the Photo” is a series of mini-documentaries in which foreign photojournalists who stayed in war-torn Sarajevo talk about how their photographs were made.
Dzemil Hodzic, the creator of the “Sniper Alley Photo” project, emphasized the goal of this project.
“The initial and most important goal is to preserve every document from being forgotten and to ensure it has its place both in education and as a warning to future generations. For some, this series may be interesting from a journalistic perspective, for others from a photography angle, and for some, it may serve as testimony for war crimes.”
“A lot of demands, even the hospital itself wasn’t functioning”
The new episode of the documentary series features David Barker. He came to Sarajevo four times for seven or eight days during 1994 as part of a film crew filming documentaries for the BBC.
“I wasn’t in Sarajevo as a war photographer or photojournalist, but as a film cameraman, to document the work of medical teams from the British National Health Service who came to Sarajevo voluntarily. We traveled with those teams. We came to Sarajevo to re-establish operations in the hospital for the situation Sarajevo was in. There wasn’t a complete medical-surgical service. There were soldiers returning from the war with amputations done at the front line, and they needed proper plastic surgery to fix that. People were being shot at in Sarajevo, there were shrapnel wounds. A lot of demands, even the hospital itself wasn’t functioning,” he said in the documentary.
Although his job was filming, he always carried a camera with him to capture moments.
“Olympus XA camera, a fantastic little camera I had in my pocket. I carried a big film camera, so when I filmed a sequence, I would put down that camera because I was waiting for something to happen. Then I would take out the photo camera and photograph. These were details that caught my eye in those moments.”
As soon as there were moments when he could stop filming, he could start photographing again.
“Many photos are just moments, just people I saw on the street and could photograph. I wasn’t overloaded with lenses, just one small camera. I just used those moments to capture something. I didn’t go looking for those photos. They came to me when I had a moment,” Barker said.
“The gas came, and the house exploded”
In the documentary, he described an incident when doctors were called to the home of two children, a boy and a girl, who had serious burns.
“They lived on the outskirts of the city, and their mother went through the tunnel during the night to get food for the family, leaving the children with their grandfather. The grandfather stayed in the house, the children were sleeping. The gas supply was turned off and on at different times, which became very dangerous. While the children were sleeping and the grandfather had also fallen asleep, the gas was turned back on, the stove was probably working. The grandfather woke up, probably lit a cigarette, and the whole house exploded. The doctors couldn’t do anything. They were in terrible condition and they died.”
“The element of surprise is, I suppose, the weapon”
Barker also described for “The Story Behind the Photo” a situation in which, as he says, he thinks a sniper shot at him.
“It was at a time when things were a bit more relaxed. Maybe a couple of cafes in Stari Grad had opened, and there were people fixing roofs. People surviving and trying to return to some kind of normalcy. We were out in the evening, drinking wine. We got out of the vehicle near the Holiday Inn and I heard a ‘Ping’ on the ground a meter from me. And then I heard a shot from the hill. So I think we were a meter away from a sniper’s bullet. Yet we were so relaxed then, the tension had eased. It was easy to move around, and still, they were up there, still shooting. That element of surprise is, I suppose, the weapon,” Barker said, N1 writes.
Photo: David Barker
