Views & Reviews Moments in between Jens Olof Lasthein Photojournalism Photography

Jens Olof Lasthein
Moments in between
Photographs: Jens Olof Lasthein
Text: Jesper Lindau
Publisher: Journal
120 pages
Pictures: 54
Year: 2000

Comments: Hardcover with dust jacket as issued, 210 x 255 mm. Text in english and in swedish. First edition, 2000. Included in Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook, vol.II. Copy in very good condition.

The walls are peppered with bullet holes, while the remains of the blown up mosque act as a wood store. A young lad stops and looks down the street in both directions, comes closer but then turns away. After a few steps he spins round, comes back and says :

- Everyone here knows what happened to the Muslims. They all know about the mass murder, but nobody can bear living with it. He then walks quickly away and disappears round a corner.

A stop in the killing and a media withdrawal doesn't mean the Balkan war is at an end. Jen Olof Lasthein's book deals with daily life in the shadow of a war. Between shellings, after ethnic cleansing or before a shot is fired.

Photographs and texts in the book came into being during travels made together in former Yugoslavia 1994-99.

From Martin Parr and Gerry Badger: "Moments in Between is an impressive example of the new, artistically aware photojournalism. It deals with the murderous break-up of Yugoslavia following the erosion of the communist bloc...Lasthein, typically, does not look at these vicious conflicts directly, but like a nineteenth-century photographer he documents the landscape of war rather than the war itself. In a series of luscious, even lyrical landscapes taken in Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Macedonia, he documents an urban topography and a social landscape blighted by war -- scarred buildings, wrecked cars, piles of rubble; yet on the streets daily life continues as routinely as possible -- women shop, children play, men work. This is the reality of a war zone: long, uneasy moments of no fighting, menaced by the continual threat of further violence. Thus Lasthein deals with the poetry rather than the hyperbole of war. He is concerned 'with daily life in the shadow of a war. Between shellings, after ethnic cleansing, or before a shot is fired.'"

Mentioned by Parr / Badger THE PHOTOBOOK: A HISTORY Volume II

JENS OLOF LASTHEIN: MOMENTS IN BETWEEN: PICTURES FROM FORMER YUGOSLAVIA from RRB Photobooks on Vimeo.