<< ...back

Pictures from Time Squanderland

To look at photographs is to look through another's eyes. The pictures are an impression of the foreigner's retina, but they are also a reflection of his own roots. The actual landscape is superposed with the way it is perceived, in a brand new image. The wide-angle sweep of the Dutch landscape is imprinted on these photographs. Hills, meadows and seascapes are instilled with a lowland spaciousness which makes their images just a touch different from what I remember. The horizon shifts. The result is a slightly surrealistic representation of the known: a landscape with a hill in the middle; a monastery shot in low-angle close-up, like a high-rise; a square; a road; a meadow with scattered sheep. It is hard to establish their order. Road, meadow, landscape, sea...

Borrowed eyes allow our gaze to pierce through to another space, another room or another country. But they are also pilots who guide us down vanished roads. Travel photographs show fragments, while at the same time concealing the routes that connect them. If the order has been preserved, then these can be reconstructed. But the order changes as the photographs change hands. In time, they become a deck of cards. The traveller's journey can no longer be charted. Ripped out of the atlas of a land built of diversity, the photographs do not reveal the complexity of the whole, the relations between parts, linguistic nuances and the heterogeneity of cultures. They represent them as separate, ideal wholes. This illusion makes a utopia seem real. Toponyms are recognised, but connections are absent. Therefore we provide them ourselves, relying on our own experience. We invoke our own mental maps. In an effort to recover and tie up invisible connections, we unpack our mental maps and relive our own trajectory through pictures of a stranger's recollections. When? How? With whom? Thus the photographs become a key which unlocks the viewer's own memory.

This is where different geographies intermix. Obvious differences between physical, political and cognitive geography grow increasingly clear. The illusion is gone. Comparison between the reality of general political and physical geography on the one hand and personal cognitive maps on the other imposes itself as an unavoidable aid in recognition. Looking at pictures becomes a geography lesson.

Only a few pictures fail to find a footing in my memory, my mental atlas which grew and shaped itself slowly and spontaneously, the way children discover the arrangement of rooms in their parents' home. There was a pervasive sense of there being plenty of time, a sense that "the rest" could be seen later, another time. But there is no more time now. Time has finally been squandered. That particular geographical concept is to be found only in obsolete atlases, in personal and family photographs.

A foreigner is guided by physical geography. He sticks to the instructions - at least at first. Later he, too, begins to discover places, constructs and is guided by his own mental maps. These emerge slowly and are complemented by personal experience. The foreigner is slowly transformed into an acquaintance, someone who is expected and welcomed as family. This is the foreigner's well-deserved reward for perseverance and dedication. That is why his pictures radiate an idyllic serenity. Exotic places as seen by a foreigner - an Outsider. A photograph registers not physical reality but the observer's fascination with the scene. The excitement of the first encounter is an experience that cannot be repeated. It is never represented in the picture. The photographed scene does not give away the secret of the photographer's experience. The foreigner can be imagined slowly penetrating the choreography of the place, trying to find at least some experiential foothold. Perhaps he has, step by step, slowly and painstakingly mastered minute local rules that provide insight into the background of the picture. In these photographs, the scenery is still more recognisable than the scene itself. The time of learning is yet to come. The photographs were made in an age before speed put an end to subject-object dualism; thus the object of the picture and the photographer still represent two scrupulously juxtaposed cultures. They eye each other warily: the former slow and lethargic, the latter eager to fathom the artistry of that torpor, trying to fathom the silence, unaware that it is an interval between two wars. Lost time. Time without history. This knowledge, however, comes only later.

Two paradoxes are sublimated in every one of these photographs. The first is the fact that a brief stay in a place generates a lasting record of it. Click! The camera registers the instant. Safe in the family album, photographs complete the chronology of a life. Every single one conceals a story beyond our reach. At some point in the future, now, taken out of the "safe", the pictures become pieces in the life puzzles of strangers. Every observer has stories of his own, memories that refer to the same scenes. Complete and accurately put together, the puzzle would reveal the picture of a fair land; a country which no longer exists. It had a metaphorical name, a name of many meanings - Yugoslavia; a name at the same time geographical, political and utopian.

The other paradox concerns the unpredictability of a photographic record's future readings. Like a mirror, a photograph is a crystal plane; a metaphor for memory, in the words of José Saramago. What we see in photographs is the past, which we seek to make more meaningful. Therefore, as in a mirror, in photographs we chiefly seek what is no longer there. This is why photographs are gateways of melancholy. In his autobiographical novel The Invention of Solitude Paul Auster reveals the many ways that melancholy can be reached through photographs. There is no melancholy in these photographs here. A Dutch friend of mine claims that she can always recognise Us: on the tram, in the supermarket, in the street. How? I ask her. It's the eyes, she says, they are full of mistrust. Only later do I realise that she means melancholy, except that modern Dutch culture has shed all pathetic associations. Pathos is Our business. According to a widespread opinion, that is Our fate. Compared to Us, Paul Auster is a mere amateur.

These pictures are notes about the age of Tito's socialism; the age of profound sleep and grand dreams. Much will be written later about the way that, in the nineties, Yugoslavs created too much history; more than they could bear, at any rate. Several wars, numberless casualties, untold devastation. The defunct country, it is now widely acknowledged, had squandered much time. The question, though, is whether all of that happened in the nineties or whether the nineties themselves were the product of a lengthy time-squandering.

There are few or no people in the pictures; just the odd nose-picking finger, in passing. Other people are rarely there; when they are, they are squandering time. Priests, of course, are proverbially idle; other people wait for a bus that is late or will not be arriving today at all; yet others carry out the task of "spontaneous" protest against things that the state dared not decry; participants in work drives strike up friendships "for life", which will turn into blood feuds; women give birth to children whom war will turn into invalids or rape victims; people sit silently on a terrace, waiting for the tedium to pass and for the surly waiter, annoyed at having to serve and being interrupted in his time-squandering, to bring them drinks that will alleviate their own sense of futility; raftsmen row down a river which will become a frontier running with blood: it will be crossed from shore to shore only and corpses, not logs, will float down it; directors make films that will be banned and shelved; writers write books that will be shredded; people read newspapers with spurious, censored or obsolete news; shepherdesses look after sheep whose milk and wool will profit no one, listening to the water-level report on their transistors; farmers plow fields that do not belong to them and will soon be part of another country, plowed by other farmers; architects draw up plans that will never be realised; constructions workers toil away at buildings that will be torn down or burnt to cinders; soldiers guard barracks of no use to the country's defense, waiting for their tour of duty to be over and for their own lives to resume; policemen lounge about, not quite sure what to do in the absence of traffic lights, street crossings and thefts; besides, it is too early for fist-fights and no one is singing banned songs. Incidentally, a further piece of evidence confirms that the policeman was squandering time: the photograph incontrovertibly proves that the foreigner took a picture of the "facility" in the presence of an "official". Although not necessarily wearing a gaudy shirt, shorts and sunglasses, which the security handbook lists as distinguishing features of "ill-intentioned" foreigners, he obviously did have a camera, item number one on the security list. Although at times risky, it was inevitable that visitors in those days would take photographs, recording their itinerary and adding uncommon scenes to their geography. These days, foreigners in that part of the world are still dressed the same way; they have no cameras and wear no shorts, but they have helmets instead. With policemen like those, no wonder the country fell apart! Pictures from time Squanderland. In Vuk Janjic's documentary Anthem, Yugoslav athletes break records and win medals, only to end up as invalids, dishwashers in factory canteens, drunks on the margins of human existence. When I saw the film in 1993, its original social criticism had acquired an entirely different dimension. It is the metaphor of a country that has squandered its people: moving pictures from time Squanderland. On the whole, these people live lives that will prove cheap, trifling and worthless. But it is only later that all this becomes clear and obvious.

A tourist, however, does not know this. A foreigner cannot know this, nor does he need to. The tourist is a sacred cow; he is a guest of those "kind people whose purpose is to entertain him", in the words of Zelimir Zilnik. The nose-picking finger is no more than a sign of benign embarrassment. It was pleasant to be a tourist in Yugoslavia. At the same time, it must have been rather eccentric to visit the country in the fifties; stranger still, to be in Kulen Vakuf or in the hills above Lake Prespa in the sixties. So it must have seemed at the time. Or vice versa.

Tourists smile. No, not in derision of their hosts and the many ways that they have of squandering time, of which they are not aware anyway. They do not care about things they cannot recognise. Their smiles are indications of genuine enjoyment of the picture and fascination with the illusion of endless time. That is why their photographs treat landscape as if it were a carefully tended flower garden or a precious vessel. Click! The vessel broke. The shards were named. Some people were left with meaningless pieces; the lucky ones came away with the neck, the bottom, or a handle. No matter what they happened to end up with - any of it worth less than the whole it used to be part of - they love it nevertheless and still call it homeland. The landscape itself remains the same - relief, mountains, lakes, rocks, meadows, woods, gorges, more lakes, out-of-the-way spots, sea, rivers. The people haven't changed either - women still wear mourning; men still pick their noses; Zastava 1300 cars are still around; work drives are no more, but "spontaneous protest" is now a compulsory manifestation of patriotism. Cacak-based "Autoprevoz" still has a monopoly on bus transportation - now on a reduced scale; and everything seems just a little bit different.

But familiar landscapes are now new toponyms - national ones. The shards have been renamed and reterritorialised. Political and cognitive geography no longer coincide. In the Balkans, playing with political geography has always been a favourite pastime. Making and remaking are frequent; few generations have been spared this task, or even able to resist the challenge. The consequences are always the same: wrack and ruin, graves, bad memories, and finally the belief that this was "the last time". The words "never again" connect lives; they link the culture and fate of the parents with those of their children. Compared to this, the loss of mental maps is trivial. In any case, the pictures now require the help of an atlas, which will explain who now possesses this or that toponym, or which state these people now live in. Some names have not changed - yet. International conventions are binding. Even though atlases have been the cheapest of sale books these past few years, the Adriatic is still the Adriatic. Although it is locally believed to have an owner, at least its name has been spared.

But familiar landscapes are now new toponyms - national ones. The shards have been renamed and reterritorialised. Political and cognitive geography no longer coincide. In the Balkans, playing with political geography has always been a favourite pastime. Making and remaking are frequent; few generations have been spared this task, or even able to resist the challenge. The consequences are always the same: wrack and ruin, graves, bad memories, and finally the belief that this was "the last time". The words "never again" connect lives; they link the culture and fate of the parents with those of their children. Compared to this, the loss of mental maps is trivial. In any case, the pictures now require the help of an atlas, which will explain who now possesses this or that toponym, or which state these people now live in. Some names have not changed - yet. International conventions are binding. Even though atlases have been the cheapest of sale books these past few years, the Adriatic is still the Adriatic. Although it is locally believed to have an owner, at least its name has been spared.

One day, I believe, I shall once again attempt to plunge into the reality of these photographs. I will arrive there as a foreigner. Then, and only then, shall I be compelled to exchange my cognitive geography for political and physical geography; to learn the new names and figure out the new meanings of familiar pictures. I dread discovering the depth of perspective of those parallel courses of history: the real one and my own image of it. I dread the realisation that I have squandered my own time believing, as in these pictures, that one can be a whole composed of multitudinous diversities. The only hope lies in personal itineraries, in inventing paths that can bring together the distant and divided landscapes of imposed foreignness.

Translation by Ivana Djordjevic

The above text is Milos Bobic' contribution to Press Now's round table discussion "Petrified Images", Amsterdam, 4 March 1999.