Book Review – Portrait of Vanished World of Rural

Thus, it's with particular emotion that I approached Swedish photographer Ann Christine Eek's Albanian Village Life. Isniq-Kosovo 1976 (Tira Books 2021). The photos she took more than 20 years before the 1998-1999 war went home with her back then, and fortunately have been preserved. As I sift through the pages of the book, slowly, because I don't want to miss any images, I think about how lucky the people portrayed in them, and the rest of us, are.

In 1976, the photographer came to Kosovo with her anthropologist friend, Berit Backer. Berit, a declared leftist in Oslo, had first been interested in Albania, a communist country she was curious about. But the country was virtually closed to foreigners and the previous year she had done research for her master's thesis in Kosovo.

Ann Christine had learned about the existence of Albanian extended families from a Swedish radio program and was intrigued by the idea. The two women, both in their late twenties, teamed up to go to Isniq, a village by the Accursed Mountains, in the region that borders Montenegro, Albania, and Kosovo, planning to stay as long as it took to work on a book based on Berit's research and Ann Christine's skills as a photographer.

Entering Yugoslavia on a tourist visa was easy for Scandinavians, and once they got to Isniq, and were quickly embraced by the local community, Berit and Ann Christine no longer thought of applying for the required official permission. Little did they know that by neglecting to follow formal procedures, they were raising the suspicions of Yugoslav state security and its local informants.

Continue reading on:

balkaninsight.com

Learn more on tagged terms