In the new episode of the project “The Story Behind the Photo,” Sniper Alley presents an interview with Peter Kullmann, the photographer who captured the siege of Sarajevo.
“I arrived on a French military flight from Ancona and had no idea what I was getting into. I was thrown off the ramp of this Transall plane standing in front of the airport building. It was a very dark day. There was a storm. It was late and getting dark. Everyone had left, and I was still sitting there, not knowing what was happening, and no one was there to take care of things in any way. Several hours later, Kurt Schork arrived, the famous Reuters reporter. He came in a car that basically had three wheels. He said he got stuck. He had been shot at. So he said, ‘You have to leave everything here. I have a trunk full of wheels. We need those wheels to get back, and they are like spare tires, wheels, and all. Leave your stuff here. We’re going to the city.’ On the way back, there were fights between Dobrinja and Ilidza,” Peter said.
He added that they were shot at again, and they had to change the front tire in all of that.
“This is war. I had no idea what it actually is and how dangerous it is, especially for journalists. So that was my entry into Sarajevo,” he continued.
He stayed in Sarajevo several times for several months from 1992 to 1995. That evening, when he had just arrived, a shell hit a courtyard in the old part of the city, killing one or two children.
“Kurt Schork and Corinne Dufka went there, and I went along, to see how it works and what is expected of me. We interviewed, that is, they talked to the parents of the family. I was surprised and shocked by the way they asked questions and how the photographs were taken, but I was also shocked by how the family, especially the father of the family, actually pushed himself and his family into the foreground of the photograph. I wasn’t shocked in the sense of: ‘How could you do that?’ but I was impressed and shocked by how they would overcome their suffering to tell this story. That was the first time I connected with the issue of people dying in war and journalists photographing it, filming it, talking about it while the father smelled the clothes of his killed children,” he said.
Peter worked with John Burns and they would drive all the way to Grbavica. They had to go all the way around, behind the airport, and to the panoramic road and then descend. It was a long drive.
“It took us a few hours to get there, going through all the checkpoints to end up about 800 meters across from the Holiday Inn, where we stayed. When we got there, it was very strange. Of course, you don’t show any bias in any way when you meet these people. I wouldn’t say you try to be friends, but you try to be friendly and not come with a hostile approach and it turned out that after the second or third day, it would be a very strange situation because these people greeted you as if we were friends. Since I’m German, some of them spoke German with me, so they would say, ‘We work in Stuttgart, we work for a big car company. We have to meet when this is over,’ and similar things, which was very strange,” he noted.
He added that it is impossible to show all the horrors that happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) through photography.
“It is quite easy to go through these situations when the adrenaline is very high when you are shocked yourself. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you. Very often you don’t know what’s going on, which is good, and you literally hear the bullet only when it has passed you. When you hear it, there’s no problem. I couldn’t go through these situations if I didn’t have a camera if I wasn’t occupied with what I’m doing,” he believes.
It should be noted that in previous episodes of the “The Story Behind the Photo” project, you could meet photographers Christopher Morris, Thomas Haley, Enrico Dagnina, and Enrico Marty, Klix.ba writes.
Photo: Linkedin
