HELEN SHEEHAN
Former Yugoslavia
This series of photographs was shot between 1993 and 1996. When the war broke out in Former Yugoslavia I was living in Venice, I had become familiar with what was then Yugoslavia right across the border from Trieste. I decided to attempt to narrate its destruction and enrolled on a Post Grad diploma at the London College of Printing. In September of 1993 I went with a Red Cross driver to the Croatian border town of Vukover which had been ethnically cleansed of its Croatian population by Serbian parimilitary groups and the Former JNA (Yugoslav National Army)-See Guardian review. This was the first in a series of photographs that narrate the destruction of multi-ethnic towns and cities across the Former Yugoslavia, depicting the futility of destruction, the tragic consequences of war, and what is left when the tanks pull back and a new barbarism has been un leashed upon a previously united people. This sequence shows Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar, Banja Luka and some border towns such as Jarmina.
© 2017 Helen Sheehan