A story about a war photo, lost and found after three decades, reunited Denijal Bašić from Sarajevo and Iranian photographer Mohsen Rastani.
Denijal Bašić and war photographer Mohsen Rastani met again after the photo from besieged Sarajevo resurfaced, bringing back memories, emotions, and a lost part of childhood.
As Bašić revealed, he grew up in Alipašino Polje as a five-year-old boy during the siege of Sarajevo. When there were no shells, he and his neighborhood friends would play at Independence Square. However, he especially remembers the day when Mohsen Rastani arrived.
“One day, a man with a pleasant smile and appearance arrived. He remained etched in my memory because of his pearly white teeth and dark skin tone. He is Iranian. He approached us, the children, with a large backdrop he used as a background, which we found interesting,” he recalled.
He said that as a boy, he had a strange habit that Rastani found intriguing, so Rastani decided to take a photo of him. A war photograph was taken between Getevoa and Bosanska Street.
“I had a strange habit of tying a jacket over my head and swinging somehow. He found that interesting, so he set up a backdrop behind me and had me pose. As I grew up, I hoped this photo would appear somewhere on Facebook. I even searched for it on forums and Reddit,” Bašić said.
However, the photo of a boy from besieged Sarajevo, taken between 1994 and 1995, was exhibited at the Kovači Memorial Center.
Denijal Bašić’s brother-in-law, Adin Hujdur, came across the photo. At the opening of the exhibition, he recognized the boy or someone who looked like his daughter, so he took a photo and sent it to Denijal.
“My brother-in-law sent me the photo because the boy looked like my daughter. I told him that was me. I was shocked, as I had been looking for that photo for a long time. I had lost hope that it would ever show up, and then, out of the blue, it appeared in my life,” he revealed.
The brother-in-law contacted Rastani and reunited him with Bašić. After they established contact, Bašić and Rastani met in Sarajevo. They toured the location in Alipašino Polje where the photo was taken and recreated a photo together.
“We toured the location in Alipašino Polje where he took a photo of me in the 90s, so we decided to recreate it,” he added.
Rastani is currently staying in Sarajevo with his wife, and his exhibition “Standing to Remember” can be viewed at the Memorial Center Kovači until June 17.
“I think all citizens of Sarajevo should visit this exhibition, as Rastani has done a lot for this city. He documented many events. It would be very good if as many people as possible visited this exhibition of high-quality war photographs, which is a unique opportunity to see them,” Bašić said.
In September 1996, Denijal attended the primary school “Meša Selimović,” and later, in the same neighborhood, graduated from the Fifth High School in Sarajevo. He graduated from the University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Law, and passed the bar exam.
Mohsen Rastani currently lives in Nurnberg, Germany, with his wife Eilin Herrmann, a German musician and professor of cello who also witnessed the encounter. Rastani is retired but still relentlessly takes photos and preserves the past from oblivion.
Unfortunately, he is fighting cancer that has affected multiple organs of the digestive tract and the liver. Despite this, he remains positive and says that a visit to Sarajevo gave him the strength to face his serious illness with his head held high. He plans to revisit the city whose heavy message he conveyed to the world, Klix.ba writes.
