War cries

Photography: Edge of Madness

RFH, London

'Welcome to Hell", reads the graffiti in a picture chosen to publicise Edge of Madness, an exhibition of photographs of Sarajevo by Tom Stoddart and Alastair Thain. But, of course, it was never as simple as that - as these pictures show.

The four-year siege of the city by separatist and heavily armed Bosnian Serbs was a horror to be endured, but survival brought out the best as well as the worst in the city's people, and that was true for those on both sides. Even the buildings shattered by war have a strange beauty, expressed in Thain's monumental landscapes of the city's front lines.

At least one punter at the show found his awesome pictures more expressive of the sorrow of war than Stoddart's people. But I keep looking at them in a rather pedestrian way, wondering if I recognise this street and that apartment block, noticing that the roads have been swept clean of the rubble that signifies war.

I wanted to see the people, arranged as they are in sections: a double row of Sniper Alley shots (people running for their lives), a graveyard section, people playing with pets, children injured by shrapnel or simply by having been separated from their parents.

"Shoot at slow intervals until I tell you to stop. Shell them until they can't sleep, don't stop until they are on the edge of madness." So said Ratko Mladic, the separatist Serb general indicted for genocide at the War Crimes Tribunal for his role in the Bosnian war. Those who obeyed his orders did the job as best they could, pushing many of the city's people over the edge.

But for all the damage inflicted, both physical and mental, the scars on buildings and citizens, my abiding sense of Sarajevo's siege, under which I lived for two years, is of survival. And that, it seems to me, is what Tom Stoddart has documented so powerfully in his pictures of the city and its people.

It was during the summer of 1995, when the shelling was almost as bloody and relentless as in the first miserable months, that Stoddart promised me a copy of a photograph showing Meliha Vareshanovic, dressed in rather 1950s finery, walking upright past some sandbags.

Her heels are high, her shoulders are thrown back, her face is lifted towards the light and her attitude is unstoppable. She is braving the streets of Dobrinja, one of the nastiest and most exposed suburbs in the city, and she is doing so with pride.

As his pictures show, many of the women of Sarajevo took time to dress with care whenever possible; they rose at dawn to fetch cold water with which to wash their hair and swapped clothes with neighbours and wore the jewellery that they had not yet pawned for food.

Those men too old or too young or too sick to serve in the trench system protecting the city, dug graves or cleared snow or distributed bread. In their spare time they sat in cafes, nursing a drink, or played cards or football or volleyball - even those crippled by war.

Of course, Stoddart shows misery and fear, pain and suffering and a little gore. Destruction and damage were all around, and some people were paralysed by terror, unable to do more than just cling to life.

But he spent much of the war documenting the private lives of people in the city, and the pictures that take me back most vividly are those of people laughing: a young woman and a soldier on a street corner, for example. Or the young girl running, smiling, into the outstretched arms of her mother, who is perched on a wall and has had both legs amputated.

The presence of death makes life precious. And the sorrow throws into sharp relief the opportunities for joy, which is why so many Sarajevans cracked sick jokes and threw parties (no food, no drink) whenever possible. As people said at the time: "If we didn't laugh, we would cry."

'Edge of Madness: Sarajevo, a City and its People Under Siege' is at the Royal Festival Hall, London SE1 (0171-960 4242) to 18 May