voicesofkosovo

By Tal Ben Yakir

 

My group did a project documenting the hopes, dreams, the fears and frustrations of the people of Kosovo. We compiled a collage of quotes, portraits and other photos, snipping the collage into square slices, and posted it on an instagram page we made for this purpose. We called the page @voicesofkosovo. 

 

The most personal part of the process of creating this project was the photography. In Kosovo, I would be walking around with my camera, taking photos of our surroundings. We wanted to capture the essence of the country: if we displayed ten photos, what should they depict? Food, bars, people, mountains? We intended to use photos that captured or reflected the topics people shared with us in interviews, or photos that evoked the emotions people shared with us. The idea was really to make viewers feel what we felt going there, so that they were moved the way we were. 

 

However, the first three days I took photos based on personal interpretation and my own feelings and emotions. We hadn’t yet done any interviews until the end of the third day, so I did not have people’s answers to base my photography on. In that sense, it allowed me some room for experimentation. It allowed me to explore my own experience of the country, and in that sense I captured some of it from the perspective of an outsider before tackling the task of amplifying local voices. Comparing the photos I took of things that pulled my eye and the ones I took based on our interviews yields a curious result: the difference between the two is not that big. 

 

This perhaps points to a more complicated issue with immersive photo essays: on the one hand you’re attempting to make the viewer feel as if they are on the journey with you, on the other hand you want to capture the “real” country, according to local eyes, avoiding the outsider’s tendency to make a fetish of the foreign. Finding that balance between authenticity and thrill requires a level of acceptance that you are not a local, and so you will never capture the country like a local would. 

 

More than that, it requires time: time to grow accustomed to the rhythm of a country’s culture, the lilt of the language, the ebb and flow of movement in a capital city. Soaking up these things, becoming a part of them without trying to claim belonging is a process that takes time — more than a few days certainly. So while I took those photos, even after having conducted interviews, I had not had the time to try and familiarise myself properly with what our interviewees were describing, not in a meaningful capacity at least.

 

Walking down the streets of Prishtina, I saw the lantern-lined, bustling bars that our interviewees were so fond of, I spoke to the people everyone described so affectionately, I heard the street musicians playing the accordion on Mother Theresa Avenue, and I smelled the grilled meat from the restaurants. But I did not always see the groups of youth sitting in cafés as a sign of endemic unemployment. I did not pick up politicians' names from the news station blasting from our hostel’s common room TV, or feel the anticipation in the air the night that leaders from the EU deliberated on VISA liberalisation for Kosovo. There are certain crucial impulses that I could not capture in my photos.

 

Regardless, we are happy with the end product of our project. Perhaps during another visit, I can give myself more time to take in the cadence of the country, to learn its movements, and do the place more justice when I capture it in my photographs.