Goran Tomašević, a “Caravaggio of photography”

On the initiative of Alain Mingam, another photojournalist who worked for Sygma, Gamma and the Figaro Magazine, Editions Lammerhuber publishes a compilation, covering 30 years of conflict, of photographs by Serbian reporter Goran Tomašević. From the Balkans to Sudan, from Afghanistan to Mozambique, from Iraq to Nigeria, the 444 pages of this one-of-a-kind work invites essential trip of photojournalism for three decades.

It is a work in every sense of the word. “A Caravaggio of the photo”, writes Francis Kochert of the National Academy of Metz. There are indeed games of shadows and lights that recall the Italian painter, but above all it is the richness of the content and the format of this book apart, which make up this work. The object weighs its weight. Heavy to carry, as heavy to carry for Goran Tomasevic, being 30 years of war, so many situations of suffering and death, but also and above all 30 years of life and journalism.

Goran Tomasevic, born in 1969 in Belgrade in Tito’s Yugoslavia, grew up in a climate of demonstrations that carried the seeds of civil war. He was only 12 when his father gave him a camera. For connoisseurs, a 5 V FED, the precursor of the Leica which will allow him to progress very quickly in this discipline, a true mode of expression of his adolescence. He constructs his photographic stories like a report, and it is only natural that he turns to photojournalism, starting with political subjects and the anti-Milosevic demonstrations.

Then, it is the Balkan war, the bombings of NATO, Goran will live the pangs of the civil war which tears his country. Of Serbian origin, he covers the situation, in Bosnia and Croatia first for the Kosovar daily Pristinathen for Reuters.

It is difficult to know if this period will forever determine the course of his career on the battlefields, only certainty, “When stories happen in your home, that’s where they hurt the most”. He loses friends, relatives, colleagues in this war, his report in a hospital in Albania, where the survivors of a NATO bombing are dying, stays in his head for a long time.

And yet, Goran manages to control his emotions, even if it’s a challenge in a war zone. Emotion is unpredictable and dangerous. On sensitive ground, he is an enemy. You have to tame your own emotions, but also those of the people around you. The emotion, it often springs when everything is over, when the photos he has taken are printed.

In the field, the photojournalist is focused on observing the facts, the concern to bring the reality of the field in its nuances to everyone’s knowledge, but once a spectator of his own work, he lets himself be overwhelmed by emotion. Because Goran’s images are expressive, they carry a deep humanity. No doubt Caravaggio’s metaphor is relevant, we find the chiaroscuro up to the tenebrism of death, the violence and brutality of the scenes and an overwhelming sensitivity in the background.

As close as possible to the combatants, to their slices of life and death, to share the terror and the suffering, by capturing them in his camera, in 267 photos, and 30 years of conflicts, Goran Tomasevic delivers here the precious testimonies of the ‘History, the one no one else has told. With the aim of telling everything in one take, and not feeling the need to take a series of several shots to tell a picture. A unique style, which has earned him the greatest international photojournalism awards, and being named photographer of the year by Reuters four times.