Extrem highlights, extreme shadows, extreme situations: Goran Tomasevic is a veteran war photographer, covering conflict for over 20 years in countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Egypt and Syria. The following film was commissioned to accompany an exhibition of Tomasevic’s images from Syria that appear the Visa Pour L’Image international photojournalism 2013. It’s a moving documentary. Tomasevic photographs with exceptional proximity as combatants mount complex attacks, manage logistics, treat their wounded, bury their dead — and die before his eyes.
Syria it is for Tomasevic. As in the ruins of Beirut, Sarajevo or Stalingrad, the conflict in Syria is a sniper’s war. Men stalk their fellow man down telescopic sights on suburban streets, hunting a glimpse of flesh, an eyeball peering from a crack, using decoys to draw their prey into giving themselves away.
During weeks spent tracking the fluid frontline of the battle, veteran war photographer Tomasevic provided daily evidence of an escalating conflict that the U.N. estimates has killed over 100,000 people.
We outsiders have grown tired of Syria, haven’t we, having no clue really about what’s going on in the world’s biggest refugee crisis since Rwanda. Tomasevic’s work sheds some light on it. Says the photographer:
I’m trying to stay as long as I can in the field. I want to show reality, and I want to show exactly how it was with my pictures.
Of his images’ potential impact he says:
I don’t know what is changing and what is not. But I hope that it does. So if I show the brutality of the war, like in Syria, maybe some people will think a bit more, maybe they will do some effort and maybe they could help this war to be stopped, not so many people necessarily dying every day.