SYMPOSIUM: Witness – Photography , Anthropology and Art in the Balkans
- Date 4 December 2026 - 11.00 a.m. - 4 December 2026 - 6.00 p.m.
- Location Garden Quad Auditorium
This day-long symposium brings together leading scholars, journalists, artists and forensic experts to examine how photography, anthropology and creative practice have documented the Balkans across more than a century of political upheaval, conflict and cultural change.
Through a series of lectures, personal reflections and visual presentations, speakers will explore the enduring role of images in recording history, shaping understanding and preserving human stories that might otherwise be forgotten.
The full programme is available below and on Eventbrite, where you can register to attend. All events are free, but advance registration is essential.
Refreshments and lunch are also available.
Symposium Programme
Morning session: Chair, Sir Noel Malcolm (All Souls)
11.00am: Opening and welcome.
11.15am: Edith Durham (1863–1944) as writer, photographer, artist and war correspondent by Dr David Shankland (RAI)
Edith Durham was one of the greatest and most influential anthropologists of her time, and an equally fine war reporter, photographer and artist. These aspects of her work were inextricably linked. Her writing had the greatest impact when it described with clarity and accuracy the intricate but tragic events that engulfed the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire entered its final decades. She had the knack of capturing through detailed example in prose the contrasting scenes that she witnessed and captured through her photography, and later expressed through her art. That absolute command of detail gave her in turn the confidence to write with certainty, whether in her war despatches, her full-length works or her persuasive missives to politicians in an attempt to influence policy.
12.00pm: Journalists/Photojournalists as witness in Sarajevo by Professor Kenneth Morrison
Professor Kenneth Morrison will discuss the work of journalists and photojournalists in Sarajevo during the near four-year siege of the city. Based on the book he co-authored with the late photojournalist and academic Paul Lowe, Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo, he will discuss how journalists and photographers functioned within a besieged city. Morrison will also consider how their practice in the field was transformed by the Sarajevo experience, how the technological shifts would change the way they worked, and how they dealt with the moral and ethical challenges they faced in reporting the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His presentation will also focus on the work of his co-author and friend, among whose rich legacy is his meticulous documentation of life and culture in besieged Sarajevo, and he will draw upon some of these images to illustrate the fascinating story of how the siege was reported.
12.45pm–2.00pm: Lunch break
Afternoon session: Chair, Julie Lawson
2.00pm: Still Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo by Allan Little
Allan Little reported the siege of Sarajevo and the wider war in Bosnia Herzegovina for three years. This paper explores why young reporters and photographers are so drawn to conflict: the magnetic pull of it; the moral and ethical concerns that motivate their belief that wakening the moral conscience of international public opinion can help to challenge and even end injustice and needless cruelty. Allan got to know well the writer Susan Sontag. They became friends when she was in the city to direct a production of Waiting for Godot. Partly through her, he came to understand that the need for creative and artistic expression can be as visceral a need as the need for food and shelter, even at the height of war. He will explore the ways in which the kind of artistic endeavour that Paul Lowe documented in his photography helped the people of Sarajevo make sense of, and survive, the injustice and suffering that was being heaped upon them.
2.45pm: On performing an opera in Sarajevo by Brian Bannatyne-Scott
Brian Bannatyne-Scott (bass singer and writer) will recount his experiences in 1996 singing the role of Death in Viktor Ullmann’s opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, with a production from the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels at the Sarajevo Festival, months after the Dayton Agreement ended the Siege of Sarajevo. He will talk about the difficulty of singing Death in a place which had known so much of it. The opera was written in Theresienstadt in 1943/44.
3.30 – 4.00pm: Tea and coffee
Final session: Chair David Shankland
4.00pm: Aftermath: Post-War Bosnia in 2002 by Sheila Masson
Sheila Masson will present a slide show and speak about her 2002 visit to Sarajevo, Tuzla and Srebrenica as a freelance photojournalist. With the support of the United States Department of State and the Eastman Kodak Company, she documented the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the road to normality following the Bosnian war. Subjects will include visiting a derelict village outside Srebrenica with a former resident, the exhumation of a Serbian soldier, and a look at DNA mapping and documentation of remains by the ICMP in Tuzla.
5.00pm: Forensic anthropology and war-crimes investigations in Kosovo by Professor Lady Sue Black (St John’s)
The British Forensic Team was deployed to Kosovo under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) throughout 1999 and 2000. Our remit was to gather and interpret forensic evidence and to present our findings to the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague, in relation to war-crimes indictments against individuals including Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić.
This will be a challenging talk, both in the images I will show and in the human stories I will tell. But it is important that we confront the evidence of what happened. The brutality and inhumanity of that time should not be sanitised or forgotten. My aim is to help you understand not only what we found, but what that evidence tells us about the human cost of conflict and the importance of forensic science in establishing the truth.
5.45pm: Closing remarks, followed by a drinks reception
About the speakers
Brian Bannatyne-Scott (Bass Singer and Writer) was born in Edinburgh in 1955, and educated at George Watson’s College and St Andrews University. He won the Decca Kathleen Ferrier Prize in 1981, and made debuts at Teatro La Fenice, Venice and the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma, as well as Scottish Opera. A long career as an operatic bass followed, with significant debuts at La Scala, Milan, Opéra de Paris, Théâtre de la Monnaie, Brussels, ENO, Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He has sung with many prestigious baroque ensembles throughout the world, making major recordings with Deutsche Grammophon and Philips, as well as appearing at famous festivals like Edinburgh, Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence and Glyndebourne. Since an accident in 2019, he has changed career to journalism, writing reviews and blogs for the Edinburgh Music Review, and has recently published a book of memoirs, A Singer’s Life.
Professor Lady Sue Black has been the 37th President of St John's College since September 2022. Professor Lady Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists and was previously the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Engagement at Lancaster University, tasked with raising the University’s profile locally, regionally and nationally, whilst championing the economic growth and regeneration of North-West England. She is Visiting Professor of Forensic Anatomy in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics in the University of Oxford.
Since graduating from the University of Aberdeen in human anatomy and forensic anthropology, Professor Lady Black has had a varied and distinguished academic career, lecturing in Anatomy at St Thomas’ Hospital London and working as a consultant in forensic anthropology for both the Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office, undertaking forensic investigations in Iraq, Sierra Leone and Grenada. She was the lead forensic anthropologist during the international war-crimes investigations in Kosovo. From 2003 to 2018 she was Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology at Dundee University.
Julie Lawson is the former Chief Curator of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Before taking up her post at the National Galleries of Scotland she studied English and Art History at the University of Cambridge and at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. She is now a freelance writer and curator. Exhibitions and publications include: Visions of the Ottoman Empire, 1994; The Philosopher’s Garden: Ian Hamilton Finlay and JJ Rousseau, 2004; Remembering the Great War, 2014; Douglas Gordon: Black Burns, 2017 (forthcoming publication, 2027)
Alan Little was born and raised in Galloway and studied at Edinburgh University. He has been a BBC journalist for more than forty years working mostly in foreign news, during which time he has worked in more than eighty countries including Iraq, Afghanistan, Zaire/Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Israel/Palestine and Libya. In the summer of 1991, he was sent to what was then still Yugoslavia for two weeks and stayed for four years. He co-authored (with Laura Silber) a book about the conflict called The Death of Yugoslavia (Penguin, 1995). He has won many awards, including the Charles Wheeler Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcast Journalism and the Sony Radio Reporter of the Year.
Sheila Masson, MLitt (History of Photography, University of St Andrews) is an independent photo historian and photographer. She has worked within photography for thirty years, both in the USA and the UK, and now lives and works in Edinburgh. She went to Sarajevo, Tuzla and Srebrenica in 2002 with the support of the US State Department to photograph the aftermath of the war, in particular the work of the International Commission on Missing Persons. Sheila is editor of the journal, Studies in Photography.
Kenneth Morrison is Professor of History and the Director of the Institute of Global Challenges and Cultures at De Montfort University. He is the author or co-author of seven books on the Western Balkans, including Reporting the Siege of Sarajevo, which he co-authored with the late award-winning photojournalist and academic, Paul Lowe. He has written and researched extensively the work of journalists and photojournalists in conflict areas, notably in the book and accompanying documentary series War Hotels. Kenneth is a British Academy Innovation Fellow and is currently seconded as a Senior Research Analyst to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)
David Shankland is Director of the Royal Anthropological Institute. A social anthropologist, he is a specialist on modern Turkey, in particular on social and religious change during the Republican period. In previous roles, he has taught at the University of Bristol and the University of Wales in this country, and in Bilkent, Hacettepe and METU in Turkey. His written works include The Alevis in Modern Turkey and Islam and Society in Modern Turkey. Alongside his regional specialisation he pursues a systematic interest in the history of anthropology, in particular the formation of modern anthropology in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century.