Featuring hundreds of images taken by Denis McCready in Sarajevo over 30 years, this book offers a reflexive testimony about the lingering aftermath of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With a mix of critical inquiry and personal accounts, the book explores and interrogates narratives of memory and truth, while documenting how trauma lives in infrastructure, gestures, silences, places and non-spaces. This visual exploration of post-war Sarajevo acts as a catalyst to reveal untold stories latent behind the images. Through chance meetings, everyday chats and formal interviews, Sarajevo residents share their testimonials and enrich the author’s reflections. As a witness, a documentarian and an interpreter, McCready navigates the ethical dimensions of testimony-based post-conflict artistic work. His reflexive practice underlines the tension between the common quest for facts and truths with the process of collecting and shaping personal and collective narratives for posterity.

This book showcases photographs taken in Sarajevo in 1996, immediately after the war, and then in 2006, 2019, 2022, 2024 and 2026. A second book is planned for the period 2027–2046, to complete a 50-year cycle.

Mirza in 1996 and 2023

After speaking this morning with the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with whom I will be collaborating again, I can confirm that I will be in Sarajevo in May and June 2026 to interview residents and take their portraits, and to make a photographic inventory of the city on film.

I am currently looking for a publisher with access to the European market. A crowdfunding campaign will eventually be launched.

For details, please contact Denis by email at denismccready AT gmail.com.

Top image – Ademir Kenović directing actors on the set of his feature film The Perfect Circle – April 1996.