A note about the lead photo. It was one of the first photos I took after arriving in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, when I went there on my own to photograph the postwar situation. I still had my backpack on from the flight, and was killing time while hoping my sole contact there would pick me up later as promised. (This was 1999, no smartphones. I had a cheap basic phone but no local SIM card yet.)

I didn’t think much of it at the time but a local friend told me what was interesting to him was the competing graffiti. The faded one in the background says ‘Nikola Mostar’ in Cyrillic. Meaning some Serb guy named Nikola is bragging he helped destroy Mostar, Bosnia, during that conflict a few years earlier.

The more recent one is the rebuttal, presumably by an ethnic Albanian, though interestingly in English. Over a smoldering literal dumpster fire. Sort of the Balkans in a nutshell.

My contact - Rod, an Australian I met on the UN aid flight from Rome - did pick me up btw, right on time in front of the Grand Hotel (locals joked it wasn’t grand and barely a hotel) in the cold rain as evening fell. By then I had discovered that who I thought was my only contact, an NPR reporter, wasn’t even listed at the hotel. So my new Aussie friend was all I had.

Turned out Rod was the local head of World Vision’s media relations. Meaning part of his job was to help visiting journalists. He put me up in a guest house for the week I was there, drove me around to sites outside the city, and let me use their office.

When the UN aid plane we had shared crashed in foggy mountains a few days later, killing everyone aboard, there was no way to leave. It was literally the only plane going in and out of Kosovo at the time. So Rod told one of his staff to drive to Thessaloniki, Greece for some World Vision business. And, oh, on the way drop off Bill in Skopje, Macedonia for his new flight.

I couldn’t have done much without him. I always seem to find a guardian angel.

As I go through my archive, the question that often looms is not just what is good but what still endures. Which is tricky when you have something that was once timely and topical like Kosovo. Why should anyone be expected to care after so many years? We have enough on our plate.

When I say tricky, first off even referring to Kosovo and Serbia as separate places would be offensive to Serbs (pre-war Kosovo was a province of Serbia, with a majority ethnic Albanian population). Kosovo finally declared independence in 2008, which Serbia still does not recognize. Even the spelling of the capital - Serbs use ‘Pristina’, Albanians ‘Prishtina’ - is loaded.

A Serb photographer friend, no right-winger himself, anguished to me back then “I still can’t believe we lost Kosovo.”

The reality of course is that the specifics of that conflict have long faded. It doesn’t take twenty-odd years for that to happen. Who is still talking about the Sudan conflict of the last couple years, which isn’t even over?

Of course for those in Kosovo, life has moved on but considering it’s the Balkans, grievances can still be ‘fresh’ after centuries,

But we can’t even keep up with our current grievances, threats, and conflicts. How can you ask someone to care about photos of what is now not just old but ancient news?

I think you do it by taking a step back and trying to universalize it. Revisit the work not for the ‘best’ photos but for what can still pull us into the story.

I’m no war photographer, Kosovo is the closest I’ve come. If you put me in an active war zone I would be useless. I’d run away from the bullets, I’m funny that way.

At the time I was more interested in the humanistic side: How would the Kosovar Albanians - just back en masse from muddy refugee camps over the border in Macedonia - try to reclaim their lives with winter coming on?

Those I met were often astonished to be alive. School started, markets reopened, but cold was the new threat with many homes without doors or windows. In the heavy, rainy gray of Kosovo in the November I was there, they tried to pick up the pieces.

But I also came to be very interested in ordinary Serbs, who were just coming out from under Milosevic. Internationally demonized for ethnic cleansing of a province Serbia claims as their religious cradle, Serbs argue they were simply defeating a separatist push until NATO got involved against them.

I saw the Serbs as victims as well as perpetrators. Victims both of the war itself and of Milosevic’s ultra-nationalist reign. Around 250,000 ethnic Serbs in Kosovo were displaced, forced from their homes in fear of revenge attacks after the war. Many would never return, though they were unwanted in Serbia proper either. Those who tried to go back at the time often ended up in tent camps under constant armed guard by KFOR troops, sometimes within view of their houses.

I wanted to understand them too. Looking back now, hardcore Milosevic supporters remind me exactly of MAGA. The same faces. And the violence and divisions of that period in the Balkans offer plenty of echoes of where we’re headed today. So many stories of friends and neighbors who got along fine, until they didn’t.

Until they started killing each other.

I normally try to be very careful about pairing photos, the contrasts can make statements that you may or may not intend. In much of the former Yugoslavia, it’s easy to get it wrong, at least depending on who you’re talking to. So, yeah, tricky stuff, but I thought I’d try anyway to juxtapose pics of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians and Serbs. Maybe it’s actually strange I’ve never tried this before.

I’m looking for certain visual and thematic combos. I want to see if it can make some elements of the situation understandable and maybe even still relevant after all this time, even without a lot of explanation. But open-ended enough to ‘read’ them and form your own ideas. I considered not even telling you which side was which, that might have been interesting but maybe not as illuminating.

Let me know what you think of these examples. This is a valuable exercise for me, especially for a project that never quite achieved final form. I have no illusion of offering answers but hope it at least provides intriguing questions or insights.