Day Zero - A Walk through Sarajevo Why did we do all this anyway? All you need is more RAM. Life in the ninetees turns out to be just like this. All we care (at least you and me - both somehow active participants of the information age) is how we could make our computer faster. Or maybe what who we`re gonna spend the weekend with. But round the corner, there was, there still is this war. Okey, you say this is normal, this is something you have to live with. There will always be wars and TV/Radio/Internet will bring you the images. I say: No. Don`t get used to it. Be mad about it. If there is nothing you can do about it personally, BE THE HECK MAD ABOUT IT. Why QuickTime VR? Five years ago or so, the started this war in Yugoslavia. It has to do with religion, it has to do with the Germans, too and their war 50 years ago. I could not believe this. I mean, I`m not considering me a very active person in political ways, just the regular mid thirty type of advertising guy. I tell you what : it made me completey mad. Then I almost didn`t listen to the news on Bosnia anymore. A bit later, I was envolved with QuickTime VR. I did my first title on baroque cities in Germany. The German wall came down. I saw cities like Dresden. It was completely wiped out at the ent of worldwar two. I thought : How did it look like when it was destroyed? Video Tapes and photographs never can bring you a location that intense as QTVR can bring it to you.
An obsession was nested in my head. If they just have had QTVR in 1945, I thought, I could learn a lot more about this state of a city this point when everything is down. I think you get the picture why I had to start this Sarajevo thing. I wanted people to explore the city on their own, not directed by a director, not by watching "good" photographs shot from the exactly best persepective. I had to preserve the whole picture. 360 degrees. What is the project, what is it not? (or is it?, anyway) Day zero is not the next big website-of -the-day like project. It is not meant to be published in whole right now. It is an archive of about 8000 diapositives. Most of them are scanned and sit on CDs right now. Many of them are "stitched" together and you can turn around inside them on your PC. But they are meant to preserve the look of the city of Sarajevo of 1996. I try to organize these panos as best I can and if someone wants to see them, I show them. Because I`m sure that this city will be a big European city some day (again), these images will be much more interesting in 10 or 20 years. Maybe I`ll put them all together as a huge multinode QuickTime VR movie on a CD-Rom later this year.
To be honest, I don`t want to add too much of a story to it, I think QuickTime VR movies are the next best thing to walking through places in real life. Adding stories about people would make it more like a video again. Something somebody directed with people and stories he or she decided to put on the title. In this special project, I just want people to walk through the city of Sarajevo. Nothing more. I want to give them the chance to think.
A year ago, in March 1996, hardly anyone dared to take a walk through Sarajevo. That`s exactly what we did (it wasn`t really too dangerous that time, mostly because Latif, the Photographer, knew where and where not he could co). I think what looks like a poor southern European city on most of the panos right now, in 1997, will be much more interesting in 2010. Maybe then, the 40 year old man from Sarajevo (who was 20 in 1990 when he went to a war against his neighbors) will show this CD with images of this sad, sad times to his children. Maybe one of them decides never to raise a weapon against another man. Then it was worth it. Organisation, Equipment We started in march 1996, Nihad (who is a refugee from Sarajevo living in Germany now - and I hope he can be around for a while) and I took the car to Zagreb in Croatia. With us a Canon SLR camera with a 28mm mount (let`s not make it seem bigger as it is) and 400 rolls of Film. The cheapest we could get at this time was Konica 100, quite good, I have to say. A simple, lightweight tripod and a Lunasix from the 1960s (both second hand) plus a Kaidan panoramic head completed the set. In Zagreb we met Latif who just was arrived there from Sarajevo. Before the war, Latif was selling kitchen equipment to Hotels, now he was looking for a job. He had told me on the phone that he had made much experience as a photographer and I wanted to teach him panoramic photography in Zagreb. The truth was, that he didn`t have any experience, but Latif is a very good man and very clever, so I let him do the job anyway. And, what else should I do? As you can easily imagine, the pictures got better every month ;)
The hardest part was to get the film rolls over to Germany. We chose private people who went back from Sarajevo with buses and cars. People who used to work in Germany before or during the war and had gone back to Bosnia to help their relatives. All images were developped by Rolf Nachbar, who owns a Studio in Wuerzburg, Germany (the city I live in) and scanned on a Kodak 2035 Photo CD Scanner by Anke Lederer. I must mention, I thank them a lot. People envolved. Here will be pictures of Nihad, Latif and me plus a few personal data. Bilder/Media |
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