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Looking at Sara Terry’s ‘Aftermath’
BY TED DROZDOWSKI
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At first, it’s the delicate mix of colors and shadows in Sara Terry’s photos that catches the eye. One shows an old woman with her head wrapped in a scarf, bent as she stares into a white bag that seems filled with long brown stems and branches. Looking at the soothing pastel shades, you wouldn’t know that what’s in the bag are discolored human bones recently disinterred from a mass grave. Again and again the instant beauty of Terry’s work gives way to sadness or a subtle kind of horror. Gypsies returning home seem a study in bright, festive clothing until you notice the pensive lines etched in their faces. A woman, her hand turned out in a gesture of peace, is framed by an alluring blue sky, and yet her face is blurred — as if she’d lost her identity. These lovely and powerful photos — which can be found on-line at www.saraterry.com — are part of a project called "Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace" that focuses on the people of that Eastern European nation in the wake of the terrible war and genocide that raged there in the early 1990s. "I’m trying to tell a story about the human spirit," says Terry, who will hold a fundraiser for her "Aftermath" work at Sabur Restaurant in Somerville this Monday. "War is about destruction, violence, conflict, and hatred — the worst things in human nature. In a war, it’s not about living. It’s about needing to survive. My conviction is that the times after war are when the real stories of the human condition are being told. I feel we have so much to learn from the Bosnian people, who are living with incredible sorrow — coping with situations we could maybe not have imagined in our own lives until after September 11." Terry has always been drawn to stories of humanity on the edge. Before she became a photographer, in 1997, she was a prize-winning journalist whose work appeared in the New York Times, Time, and the Christian Science Monitor and on the now-defunct Monitor Radio Network, among other respected outlets. Her reportorial work has ranged from stories on the assassination and torture of street children by Guatemalan death squads to grass-roots efforts to bridge America’s "digital divide." One particularly harrowing series she authored was on child exploitation in the developing world; it required her to purchase youngsters from Asian brothels and to take a canoe up a Peruvian river for three days to find child laborers. "I was almost destined to be a journalist," the former Boston resident explains over the phone from her Los Angeles home. "There’s a joke in my family that I was born talking. I’ve always believed that honest, truthful words could persuade, illuminate, break through. But I had a crisis, with a relationship with a really good, close friend who had lost his bearing in the world. And in this friendship, my words totally failed. They didn’t mean anything, and I was devastated. I stopped writing and started taking photos, almost by accident. I went around taking pictures of my foot in a green sneaker at places in Boston that were part of the history of my relationship with this person, in an attempt to awaken his memory." Terry traveled in an attempt to help weather that crisis. While on a flight, she saw an ad in Condé Nast Traveler for creative-writing and photo workshops in Tuscany. "I went for the writing workshop and stayed for the photography." Quickly she began to develop a personal style, shooting through windows and capturing reflections and colors. She returned to Asia to view that part of the world through her lens, in hopes of finding a subject for her photography that would ignite and inspire her imagination. Instead she found that ignition in the pages of the Monitor. "I was reading a piece in the summer of 2000 that said that for the first time in five years more Bosnians than ever wanted to return home. This was in the wake of the war and ethnic cleansing that created their terrible upheaval — a mass exodus. Finally people were feeling safe enough to go back, but at the same time the international community was getting what they called ‘Bosnia fatigue’ and was pulling out and taking its money elsewhere. What that meant was that only about 24 percent of the people who wanted to go home could have assistance returning to Bosnia. That boggled my mind. The minute I read that article, I felt I had to go and do whatever I could to witness this place. They still had a Communist mentality when they were plunged into this brutal war with genocide, and afterward there were no democratic institutions to support rebuilding. That blew my mind. "What I found when I arrived was a certain amount of hatred and a mental climate of deep struggle. Imagine having to rebuild a community when, perhaps, a loved one had been murdered, and having to look every day into the eyes of a neighbor who might have participated in that murder." A Bosnian college student whose parents passed away while she was separated from her family by the siege of Sarajevo explained the situation to her this way: "You have to learn to forgive and forgive and forgive." The Somerville fundraiser is the first such event that Terry will stage in major American cities with significant Bosnian immigrant populations, including Chicago and St. Louis. More than 7000 Bosnians who fled the conflict live in New England, including the owners of Sabur Restaurant. Terry will show slides of her photography and discuss her experiences in Bosnia at the Monday-night benefit. She has registered the "Aftermath" project as a non-profit under the auspices of the Seattle-based Blue Earth Alliance. Money raised will help defray travel, translations, film, developing, and other expenses as she completes her shooting through 2004 and prepares "Aftermath" for a December 2005 book. "It’s the nature of the media to cover what makes headlines and not deal with the long-term consequences and the meaning of events. What I’m documenting is what happens after the headlines go away, and how people try to go about rebuilding their lives." Sara Terry’s slide show and discussion for "Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace" will take place this Monday, September 22, at 7 p.m. at Sabur Restaurant, 212 Holland Street in Somerville; call (323) 664-3064 or e-mail saraterry@mindspring.com
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