"À l’encontre du ‘mode soldat’: trois phototextes réalisées pendant la guerre de Bosnie-Herzégovine”

Résumé En

This article examines three contemporary phototextual responses to the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and more particularly the sieges of Sarajevo and Tuzla. The first is a French magazine article by NGO aid worker Valérie Ceccherini, who sent her amateur photographs and story to Les Inrockuptibles, a music magazine, open at that time to freelance photo-journalism. The second is a fundraising brochure produced by a British trade union collective. The third is a French photobook by Jérôme Brézillon (1964-2012) with texts by freelance journalist Christian Lecomte. The authors had to find new, substitute spaces for publication and circulation because they told alternative, marginal stories about the situation in the former Yugoslavia that were not publishable as news. Furthermore, the three phototexts were published during the decade that saw the gradual demise of the economic models of photojournalism that had lasted through the twentieth century. Whether covering news or features, photojournalists were seeking other spaces to show their picture-stories, such as music magazines, NGO publications, or the photobook. Whilst the photobook is at present thought to be in its golden age—judging by the number of coffee-table books devoted to it since 2000—this paper looks closely at phototextual publications that were so rooted in the social history of their moment that they question the pertinence of the notion of “the collectable” at the heart of the “Badger & Parr” definition of the photobook (Badger, Parr, 2004). This paper utilises Ivana Macek’s key concepts of the “soldier mode” and the “deserter mode” (Macek, 2009) in order to understand what was and still is at stake in the phototextual rhetoric of war reporting.