For her book ‘Album 1990-1999’, Gresa Nuredini asked Kosovo Albanians to provide their own family snapshots – showing how they would like the turbulent decade to be remembered.
Her mental image of the 1990s, however, “had a lot of obscurity and unknown territory”, she told BIRN.
Albert Bashota provided this photo for ‘Album 1990-1999’. Photo courtesy of Gresa Nuredini
“I was always quite curious and interested to know what war actually looked like for my people, for the oppressed.”
In exploring the past, Nuredini – who is from the eastern Kosovo town of Gjilan/Gnjilane – came to discover a huge difference between the photographs she saw in school textbooks, and those in her family albums.
That discovery became the catalyst for ‘Album 1990-1999’, a book of family photographs from Kosovo during the last decade of the 20th century, assembled by Nuredini from across the country.
“In history books,” she said, “these people were portrayed in a way they wouldn’t want to be remembered… They weren’t asked to be in these photographs, whatever the cause of the photographs”.
Nuredini was motivated by the need to delve into personal archives, into photos in which “people had a right and a say in how they would like to be remembered”.
Process based on trust
Photos in the book ‘Album 1990-1999’. Photo courtesy of Gresa Nuredini
Published in December as part of the Swedish-funded Heritage Space platform, Album 1990-99 covers nine turbulent years in Kosovo, at that time a southern province of Serbia.
The period began with the passive resistance of Kosovo’s Albanian majority to the repression they were subjected to under Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia after he revoked Kosovo’s autonomy; it ended with a guerrilla uprising and Milosevic’s brutal response, a wave of ethnic cleansing and massacres conducted by Serbian forces and, finally, NATO air strikes.
With the end of hostilities, Kosovo became a ward of the United Nations and declared independence in 2008 with the backing of the major Western powers.
A photo provided by Jeta Veseli for ‘Album 1990-1999’. Photo courtesy of Gresa Nuredini
Nuredini selected 167 photographs for the book from more than 1,000 offered by people across the country. The process was as important as the final product.
“These 167 photographs are all photographs that I personally collected myself, took the original physical copies of the photographs and scanned them,” she said.
“We decided to only use the photos we had physical copies of because the whole concept and theme of the book is collective solidarity in a time of decadence, in a time of distress.”
“All of this exchange was based solely and truly on human trust, on a promise to return the photographs within a couple of days.”
The book consists of three chapters: ‘Memories Before the War’, ‘Memories After the War’ and ‘In Honour of Lost People, Abandoned Houses and Erased Memories of Time’.
‘In Honour of Lost People, Abandoned Houses and Erased Memories of Time’, the third chapter in ‘Album 1990-1999’. Photo courtesy of Gresa Nuredini
Its dark red binding resembles that of an old photo album.
In the process of collecting and scanning the photos, Nuredini said she was interested in “solidarity and unity” between people, in bringing them together, “with their loved ones, so they could choose their favourite photographs of the nineties, the ones they hold dear”.
Each photograph has a story behind it which appears in an index at the back of the book, so the reader can “get to know these people and their narratives better”, said Nuredini.
Gresa Nuredini. Photo courtesy of Gresa Nuredini
On a personal level, Nuredini said the experience had taught her “to sit down and listen to people”.
“Sometimes,” she said, “listening to someone teaches you so much more than asking”.
The result is a shift in perspective onto the people, “to the actual firsthand experiences of that period”.