“If I don’t photograph it, it won’t become known,” Anja Niedringhaus says. From 1991 to 2000 she worked as an agency photographer in the Balkan war zones. The pictures she sent to Germany from Tirana, Sarajevo, Mostar or Pristina were published in the international press, in magazines and in daily papers. They are portraits. They show injured people, dead people, people mourning, aged men and women, struck dumb by resignation, young women, their faces filled with horror, civilians fleeing, children playing in the ruins; and in the midst of it all, time and again, moments of hope and of new beginnings. Photo reporting always has something to do with people, and it always has a documentary character. Anja Niedringhaus’ photographs document war.

For all their dramatic nature, these documents bearing witness to war are more than one-dimensional depictions of reality. The camera does not simply reflect what happened to be in front of the lens at a particular moment. Anja Niedringhaus’ work is a reflection of her will that determines moment in time, motif, perspective and cropped section. And she takes a stance, as otherwise the image would get lost in the arbitrariness of the moment.

What face does war have? In how much detail do we want to see it? Can we endure it at all? Anja Niedringhaus had no-frills reality right before her eyes for several years. Yet her photographs spare our feelings: they let us sense the horror by degrees of approximation and refer to human violability in the midst of complete destruction.

Image: Albanian tank during a cease-fire, Kukes, Albania, 3 June 1999, 30 x 40 cm

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