Portraits of Yugoslav Army Soldiers: Between Partisan and Pop-Culture Imagery

Portraits of Yugoslav Army Soldiers:

Between Partisan and Pop-Culture Imagery

TANJA PETROVIĆ

RITUAL AND INTERPRETATIONAL UNCERTAINTY There is probably not a single photo album1 in the former Yugoslavia that does not contain a portrait of a young man in the uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija, henceforth JNA)2 taken in a

1 As stressed by Frizot, “das Fotoalbum wird vor allem als Familienalbum, als ein

privates Gedächtnis der Amateurfotografen thematisiert”, in: Frizot, Michel: “Familienalbum”, in: Michel Frizot (ed.), Neue Geschichte der Fotografie, Köln: Könemann 1998: 679. It is simultaneously a repository of memory and an in-strument of social performance, see: Langford, Martha: “Speaking the Album: An Application of the Oral-Photographic Framework”, in: Annette Kuhn/Kirsten Emiko McAllister (eds.), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books 2006: 223. The narration provided by a photo album is usually organized chronologically around the most important in-dividual and family rituals (education, wedding, travels etc.), see: Bickenbach, Matthias: “Fotoalbum”, in: Nicolas Pethes/Jens Ruchatz (eds.), Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon, Reinbek: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag 2001: 178.

2 The Yugoslav People’s Army was a military force of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Military service, which lasted between one and three years in different periods, was mandatory for all men after they turned eighteen and/or graduated from high school. Milićević, Aleksandra Sasha: “Joining the War: Masculinity, Nationalism and War Participation in the Balkans War of Se-cession, 1991–1995”, in: Nationalities Papers 34.3 (2006): 266. The JNA was an institution organized and ideologically shaped both as a central embodiment and main agent of the unity of all people living in socialist Yugoslavia. It was

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local studio in a town where the person in the photograph performed mili-tary service. The photographs in family albums depict male family mem-bers, but also relatives and friends, since JNA soldiers used to mail them home, as well as to their relatives and family friends. These photographs were often stylized as postcards, with the inscription “A souvenir from JNA” or “A memory from JNA”.

Studio portraits of men in uniform are neither unique to Yugoslav sol-diers nor are they a ‘socialist invention’.3 However, while portraits of this kind were usually taken during periods of war and were sent by soldiers to their family members with the main message that they were alive and well,4 in socialist Yugoslavia such studio portraits were products of a cultural practice that was characteristic of peaceful times.

The portraits were embedded in family frames and ideology of patriar-chal masculinity, but they also related to the state ideology, of which the JNA was an important part. Sending their photographs taken in local studi-os far away from their homes, young men were also sending a message to their families and friends that they were successfully completing the initia-tion to adulthood through fulfilling themselves in the role of Yugoslav army soldiers.

Within the framework of the patriarchal tradition of the former Yugo-slav societies, military service was perceived as a necessary step towards becoming a mature man who would be able to assume the responsibilities of the head of the family and a member of society.

considered as one of the most important pillars of Yugoslav unity, and often re-ferred to as “the forge of Yugoslavism” (kovačnica jugoslovenstva) and “school of brotherhood and unity”: Bjelajac, Mile: Jugoslovensko iskustvo sa multiet-ničkom armijom 1918–1991 (Yugoslav experience with multiethnic army 1918–1991), Belgrade: Udruženje za društvenu istoriju 1999: 13. To strengthen the idea of unity among all Yugoslav peoples, the JNA had a policy of sending re-cruits as far from their homes as possible, always to another socialist republic.

3 On the website Skarabej – Online museum of old family photographs (www.skarabej.com), there are among numerous photographs of JNA soldiers also portraits of soldiers from all around the world (the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, etc.), as well as portraits taken in the former Yugoslav lands, but in earlier periods.

4 Cf: Willis, Deborah: “A Search for Self: The Photograph and Black Family Life”, in: Marianne Hirsch (ed.), The Familial Gaze. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England 1999: 118–119. In her study of the WW1 postcards, Christine Brocks (2008) also discusses those in the form of soldiers’ portraits.

PORTRAITS OF YUGOSLAV ARMY SOLDIERS | 3

The subjects of these portraits do not have much choice about how and where their photograph is taken, but are placed in a staged setting. The stage is neutral and does not provide any particular background. The only distinct and recognizable element of the photograph is the JNA uniform, which serves as a backdrop.

Ill. 1–2: Studio portraits of JNA soldiers

Men photographed in dress uniform perform/stage the identity of the so-cialist Yugoslav soldier, just as Auschwitz inmates could have their por-traits taken at a photo place that had a camp uniform – “a new and clean one – to make souvenir photos”5 perform, or stage the identity of the camp inmate.6 While in the latter case, the mere performance of the identity of a concentration camp inmate makes the photographs particularly disturbing,7 the identity performance of JNA soldiers is distinctly different in character. The JNA uniform as a backdrop, neutral background and fixed posture and photographic conventions and protocols make the practice of taking studio portraits of JNA soldiers highly ritualized. Understood as an initiation that enables young boys to enter the world of adults and become family men, the JNA service as a whole was ‘surrounded’ by a number of practices that were ritual in character. Army send-offs, paid songs played on local radio

5 Spiegelman, Art: Maus, zgodba o preživetju, II: In tu so se začele moje težave,

Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003: 134. 6 Hirsch, Marianne: Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory,

Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press 20022: 38. 7 M. Hirsch: Family Frames: 38.

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stations at the request of parents, grandparents and relatives, being photo-graphed in a local studio once they became JNA soldiers and sending pho-tos to their family members, friends and relatives were all practices young men entering the JNA service were participating without necessarily being fully aware of their meaning and even without completely internalizing these practices and messages they could convey.

The JNA service as an experience also possesses numerous features with which Stephan Feuchtwang8 defines ritual: it is characterized by repe-tition, standardization and ‘orthopraxy’ – it is a prescribed and thus deliber-ately learned discipline separated from the everyday; it is also essentially an expression of power that always involves negotiation of authority. The everyday reality of men serving in the JNA was composed of highly orga-nized and structured practices that, once learned, became predictable. The hierarchy among the men involved was strictly defined. The language used in the Yugoslav army was highly structured and predictable as well. In (late) socialism it was characterized by standardization of discourse forms just as public language in general,9 but in the context of the military, where official communication was largely based on performatives (giving orders, asking for permissions...), the standardization of discourse forms and the consequent ritualization of language use were even more radical. This resulted in a situation where, as in ritualized practices that emphasized the traditional/patriarchal aspect of their military service, young men “regularly paid little attention to the literal meanings of the ritualized acts and pro-nouncements in which they participated”.10

The ritual nature of the JNA experience offers itself as a self-evident answer to the question why army stories are still so persistent and ubiqui-tous in the post-Yugoslav space and why they are ‘insensitive’ to currently dominant (national) discourses and ideologies as well as significantly changed values and generational differences. The fact that most former Yugoslav men who served in the JNA regard it as a worthwhile experience and still find it important to share their army stories and memories can be interpreted as a way for them to preserve and maintain the memories of that

8 Feuchtwang, Stephan: “Ritual and Memory”, in: Susannah Radstone/Bill

Schwartz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, New York: Fordham University Press 2010: 281–298.

9 Yurchak, Alexei: Everything was Forever until it was no More: the Last Soviet Generation, Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press 2006: 14.

10 A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever until it was no More: 16.


peaceful, structured and ritualized period in which they were protected and others took care of their existence. Understood this way, these memories should provide a ‘shelter’ from the present as well as more recent past, both characterized by rupture, shaken structures, trauma and insecurity.

While the ritual nature of the JNA certainly has to do with remembering military service as a way to forget some other experiences, the explanation that people remember their military service in order to overcome trauma proves unsatisfactory, considering that the need to remember their JNA service and to stress its positive aspects is expressed by a wide range of people who dramatically differ according to their social, educational and ethnic background, but also in the way how they acted in the 1990s as well as in self-perception and the degree of their success and security achieved in the post-Yugoslav period. Limited to this explanation, the understanding of JNA memories cannot avoid the traps of interpreting socialist experience in general – where subjects are perceived as passive and without tools to reflect upon their own experience and where the meaning of social struc-tures is strongly emphasized, while subjectivities inscribed into these struc-tures are largely ignored.11 To put it differently, in such interpretations, the former Yugoslav men subjected to the JNA institution are regarded as people who had no agency and who completely and passively gave them-selves up to the JNA and its mechanisms of disciplining, controlling and managing. The aspect of personal engagement and investment stressed by so many former JNA soldiers while reflecting upon their army experience is neglected in such interpretations.

As an alternative, I suggest not to look solely at the ways in which the institution of the JNA shaped the experience of the former Yugoslav men, but also at possibilities for their engagement and negotiations that emerged from the ritualized reality of the JNA service. The ritualization is always followed by detachment of the act from its literal meaning. This detachment has important consequences on the ways how the JNA service is remem-bered and how these memories are interpreted. At the time the service was performed, its ritualized nature provided the possibility for play and sub-version without total exclusion of support. At the bottom line, identification was a precondition for any distance and subversion: soldiers had to acquire all the rules and conventions of these ritualized practices in order to be able

11 For more on this see A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever.

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both to subvert them and to ‘survive’ in the army. Detachment of the act from its literal meaning has also significant epistemological consequences on the ways how both the JNA experience and memories of it are interpret-ed. It makes practices constituting the JNA service and memories of the JNA “sites of epistemological uncertainty”12 about how to under-stand/interpret them and their actors.

In this text I aim to explore the consequences that the ritualization of the practice of taking JNA studio photographs has had on the ways in which we ‘read’ these photographs today. Photographs that schematically depict young men in the JNA uniform put a strong emphasis on the form, which then prevents individuality from coming to the fore and ‘speaking’. What I want to argue here, however, is that this silenced individuality by no means makes all JNA soldiers ‘the same’ – on the contrary, this silence warns us that their sameness is only a frame for very different, often con-tradictory negotiations, and that the messages of the utterances they pro-duce do not necessarily stick to the form. What is even more important, this “hegemony of form”13 grants JNA soldiers what I call representational autonomy, referring to representation mainly through the question who represents whom i.e. who speaks on behalf of whom.

FROM YUGOSLAV PARTISANS TO JNA SOLDIERS

Despite the high uniformity of portraits, it is nevertheless possible to out-line the development of JNA portraits with regard to their formality/degree of ritualization. Early JNA studio portraits draw heavily on the Partisan imagery from the war that had just ended. The soldiers depicted can be most easily placed in time by still not standardized uniforms, and the divid-ing line between Partisan fighters and early JNA soldiers is often blurred. On the website www.kolekcionari.com, which gathers collectors of varia from the past, one can follow several discussions as to whether some pho-tographs depict Yugoslav Partisans or JNA soldiers from the early period. For collectors, the most reliable way to distinguish Partisans from early JNA soldiers is by the look of their uniforms. “In the early Yugoslav army soldiers would wear parts of German uniforms, but they were ‘de-nazified.’

12 Appadurai, Arjun: “The Colonial Backdrop”, in: Afterimage 24 (1997): 4. 13 A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever, chapter 2.


I have some photographs where this is visible... But in this (particular) photo they are Partisans for sure, because they wear uniforms of the Allies and some still have stars sewn on their caps – that was quite rare after 1946,” writes one of the discussants in reference to a photo depicting a group of six men in uniform.14 The same dilemma was also solved by a closer look at the uniform in the photo below, so that it was defined as a photo of a Partisan.

Ill. 3: A portrait of a Yugoslav Partisan

The early period of JNA soldiers’ studio portraits is also recognizable by posture and decoration that were common for all studio portraits of the time: common elements of studio decoration, such as artificial flowers, curtains or armchairs, provided a scene for all kinds of portraits – of indi-viduals, families, wedding couples, and soldiers alike. Although the reasons for using these elements were often technical, they nevertheless (albeit inadvertently) further contributed to securing the early JNA portraits a firm place among other family photos. Full figure portrait and a posture of the photographed soldier that enables eye contact are important characteristics of these early photos.

14 http://www.kolekcionari.com/showthread.php?t=10564, posted 15 April 2011,

last access: 24 April 2011.

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Ill. 4–6: Early studio portraits of JNA soldiers

While ideologically, the Partisan imagery was a fundamental element of the JNA throughout its existence, in the case of studio photography it is never-theless possible to claim that the image of a JNA soldier gradually gained certain autonomy from the Partisan imagery – not by a radical break from the Partisan tradition, but with the formalization and increased fixity of the portraits and the ritualization of photographic practice. The posture, expres-sion and design of the portrait as a whole were strongly fixed in the period roughly between the early 1960s and early 1980s.

Ill. 7–8: ‘Typical’ studio portraits of JNA soldiers

Such portraits became romanticized, most saliently by the absence of eye contact, and got a tinge of the past the very moment they were created (the practice of making material memories/souvenirs from the JNA service).


Apart from the absence of direct eye contact, the most salient visual charac-teristic of these portraits is the standardized and well-kept uniform.

Also, in addition to belonging to the domains of the state ideological and the familial, the practice of studio photography became a site of negoti-ation of cultural identities for JNA soldiers. Portrayed subjects in the JNA uniform referred not only to the Partisan imagery, but also to various as-pects of popular culture, such as the Hollywood world of celebrities.

In SVEČANA OBAVEZA (1986), a TV movie directed by Božidar Nikolić and written by Siniša Kovačević, there is a scene in which after the military oath ceremony a soldier goes to a local photo studio called “Hollywood”. There he is asked by the photographer whether he wants to pose as Marlon Brando or have a “Greetings from JNA” inscription. He chooses the for-mer, for which he has to pay more. Even these highly standardized por-traits, strictly defined by the JNA uniform, show what Samuel draws atten-tion to: “people [...] draw models for personal portraits from other media, including cinema.”15

This photographic practice provided a basis for cultural differentiation among soldiers: not all of them would make this kind of souvenirs – urban young men often considered it kitschy and a sign of backwardness. Alt-hough they would not make these portraits themselves, these same men nevertheless kept portraits of their army mates which they received from them as a souvenir. Placed in personal photo archives, portraits of army buddies – although a sign of cultural difference between the person photo-graphed and the current possessor of the photograph accentuate the ties of friendship and emotional attachment between them. As in the case of other JNA-related practices, difference is simultaneously a basis for connection, solidarity and friendship (maintained or only remembered).

15 Samuel, Raphael: Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary

Culture, London: Verso 1994: 369.

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REPRESENTATIONAL AUTONOMY

As objects of interpretation, the portraits of JNA soldiers, defined by the JNA uniform and fixed posture, with individual characteristics pushed to the background, create an empty space which underlines the inherent ambi-guity of the word ‘pose’ “with its double implications of posture as decep-tion and posture as stance”.16 The empty space may be filled with different meanings. This emptiness does not leave ‘readers’ of the photographs much relaxing self-confidence: whatever way we read them, there is always an awareness that other readings are possible or, at least, cannot be absolutely excluded.

This uncertainty related to ritualized objects and acts protects involved individuals and groups from exposure to interpretations with which they would identify and assures them a certain amount of representational au-tonomy. At the time of serving in the army, JNA soldiers could make use of similar autonomy due to the ritualized nature of the JNA service. Let me illustrate this with an example of language use. Performing the JNA ser-vice, soldiers also acquired the language of the military. Conducted exclu-sively in Serbo-Croatian, communication within the JNA was highly ritual-ized and performative, abundant with technical terms, abbreviations for all possible procedures and objects (and long bureaucratic names for which these abbreviations stood), and commands that were used according to a precise protocol.

In his study on late socialism in the Soviet Union, Aleksei Yurchak uses the Russian slang expression ‘stiob’ referring to “particular form of irony that differed from sarcasm, cynicism, derision, or any of the more familiar genres of absurd humor. It required such a degree of overidentification with the object, person, or idea at which this ‘stiob’ was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two”.17 In the context of the Yugoslav army, where the official language use was strictly defined, strongly per-formative and ritualized, it is the combination of subjecting to the rules of official communication and overidentifying with the socialist ideology by an exaggerated use of its language that created a site for irony and potential subversion, simultaneously making it impossible to judge with certainty the

16 A. Appadurai: “The Colonial Backdrop”, 5 17 A. Yurchak: Everything was Forever, 250, emphasis in original.


seriousness/sincerity of one’s statements and intentions. This capacity of language use within the army is nicely illustrated in the movie KARAULA (2006) in which a soldier, well-known for his problematic behavior, ap-proaches his superior with an unusual request to go to Belgrade on foot to visit Tito’s grave. Expressing his request, the soldier, otherwise known as someone who breaks the rules and shows disobedience to authorities, strict-ly sticks to formal expressions and the prescribed use of language when addressing a superior officer. The officer, on the other hand, constantly tries to break the set rules – by informal responses to very formal addresses, by ironic comments, and by insulting qualifications. Deviating from clearly defined communicational rules is a privilege of a collocutor who is superior in rank, but this practice can be fully understood only if related to the con-cepts of interpretational uncertainty and representational autonomy: by breaking the fixity and ritualized character of formal communication, the lieutenant hopes that his collocutor will do the same, step out from the shelter provided by the fixed forms and make it possible for him to decide about the sincerity and seriousness of the soldier’s words. As long as the soldier remains in the framework of the fixed, ritualized forms and canons, the lieutenant cannot know whether the soldier really thinks what he says.

Ritualized language and highly defined procedures of official commu-nication within the JNA, which by its nature contributed to the strengthen-ing of hierarchy and keeping soldiers subordinate to officers, simultaneous-ly kept soldiers ‘safe’ by providing them with the possibility to express irony and detachment, in circumstances that made it impossible to form any reliable judgment about their sincerity. This impossibility paradoxically transforms the use of ritualized language into a tool for relativization – and even inversion – of positions defined in terms of authority and subordina-tion.

Let us now return to JNA studio portraits. The most radical realization of detachment of meaning from the form is observable in what the JNA jargon called ‘photos with memory’. Here the person photographed with his individual characteristics, attitudes and beliefs is pushed even more to the background: in these portraits the backdrop, already defined by the JNA uniform, comes to the foreground and becomes materialized as a frame in which individuals with their particularities are exchangeable. The frame is real – made of cardboard or wood, with inscription “Uspomena iz JNA” (Memory from the JNA – hence the name) and drawings of the Yugoslav

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flag, red star, tanks and other weapons, portrait of Tito and other images with which young men in uniform were expected to identify. Photo-graphing in this kind of frames (typically available at sites such as amuse-ment parks, tourist sites, fairs and festivals) usually suggests ludic atmos-phere and implies “ideas of humor, irony or play”.18 It serves as a tool for “resistance to the realist pretensions of photography, by distorting or escap-ing quotidian contexts and predicaments”.19 The frames in which JNA soldiers were portrayed, however, are void of any ironic, humorous and ludic pretext (which does not necessarily imply that these meanings could not be attached to them). They did not signal deception, but the opposite, they stressed and brought to the fore the backdrop already defined by the JNA uniform.

Ill. 9–10: Portraits “with memory”

Veselin Gatalo, a writer from Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina, described his JNA service in Sarajevo in an autobiographic novel titled A Photo with Memory (Slika sa uspomenom, Gatalo 2009). The meaning of the title is revealed in one of the chapters: one day, his army buddy Nazif from Sandžak (a Muslim-populated border region between Serbia and Montene-gro) left the barracks and went to town. The next day, he showed the au-thor/narrator, with pride and delight, a photograph taken in a local studio.

18 A. Appadurai: “The Colonial Backdrop”, 5. 19 A. Appadurai: “The Colonial Backdrop”, 5.


The narrator ironically describes what he saw: “It was him, Nazif, on the photo. Around him, Nazif, was some green heart-like wreath, with a red star on the top of it. Under the wreath were the letters JNA.”20 Nazif enthu-siastically explained how to get this photo: “See, this is painted, and you need to stand here. The photographer takes a photo and after one week you can pick them up. [...] [The price] is nothing. I made three photos – one for my parents, one for my sister, and one for me [...]. It’s called a photo with memory. When you go to the photo studio that is what you need to ask for.”21 For the narrator, an urban guy from Mostar, ironic and reluctant about most aspects of the JNA experience, these photos were ridiculous, while for Nazif they were important and a source of pride, just as the fact that he was a JNA soldier. For the young man from an under-developed region of Sandžak, these were also rare photographs of himself.

The movie SVEČANA OBAVEZA, too, features a humorous and ironic scene of ‘taking a photo with memory’: Zoran, a geography teacher from Belgrade impersonates his army buddy Ranko, a farmer from Vojvodina, and meets Ranko’s father, who abandoned and rejected his son many years ago, so that now he cannot recognize the deception. Having been drinking a lot already, they go to a local studio to take a photo. The photographer instructs Zoran how to hold ‘the memory’, a cardboard frame with the inscription “Memory from the JNA”, uttering sentences such as “Lift the memory! Put it down a little... Even the memory!”, which are logically absurd, but necessary to produce the desired result – the photo of the ‘son’, JNA soldier, with which the ‘father’ proudly leaves. During the photo ses-sion Zoran is visibly confused as a result of the combination of his fake identity and strange relationship with a man who believes to be his father, as well as of being drunk and involved in a photographic practice he would probably avoid if it were himself. However, the very outcome of ‘photo-graphing with memory’ is by no means affected by the confusion and es-trangement of its protagonist – it is a romanticized photo of a forward-looking young man in uniform, framed with improvised decoration that is meant to transform the photo into an object of memory/souvenir the very instant it is created and to add a tinge of the pastness to it much earlier than

20 All translations into English from Gatalo (2009) are mine. 21 Gatalo, Veselin: Slika sa uspomenom, Sarajevo: Mauna-Fe 2009: 72.

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it actually becomes the past.22 It is very much like countless images of the same kind that can be found in family albums across the former Yugosla-via, internet collections of ‘old photographs’ and at auction sites where they are offered for a low price as ‘antiquities’.

Or to put it differently: it is precisely the highly ritualized nature of stu-dio photography practices, due to which the meaning of the practice/ritual was not necessarily important/available for those who practiced it (detach-ment of the meaning from the practice is further strengthened by the de-tachment of ‘memory’ from ‘the photo’ in this photographic practice), that enabled persons with so different backgrounds, personal stories and worldviews such as Zoran and Nazif to unproblematicaly ‘fit’ the impro-vised cardboard frames. Consequently, these uniform, standardized images allow for reading very different meanings into them. It is their explicit staginess that warns us that plain, one-layered interpretations cannot prove satisfactory for these images – and the same is also true for the army expe-rience as a whole.

The context in which studio portraits of JNA soldiers were produced as-sured portrayed persons a ‘protected’ and ‘autonomous’ position. Portrayed on their own initiative, but within a ritualized (familial and broadly social) framework in which this initiative could, to a large extent, be the fulfillment of set expectations, soldiers did not necessarily reflect upon the performed act. Furthermore, the very act of photographing was highly predefined by conventions and fixed protocols of the time, which minimized the role of the photographer in making decisions about the result of photographing. The minimized role of the photographer is nicely illustrated by the photo-graphic scene in SVEČANA OBAVEZA: there is a large cross (X) drawn on the studio wall and the photographer does nothing but instruct the soldier to look at this sign. Uniformity of photos makes solders as individuals si-lenced, but not muted: it is precisely the ritualization and uniformity that 22 As Corinne Kratz points out, realism is not necessarily an inherent feature of

portrait photography – on the contrary, “as photographic practice developed in the United States in the late 1830s, the extreme lifelike quality of daguerreo-types was seen as a hindrance to portraiture. Photographic conventions that dis-tinguished between portrait and mere likeness developed in the 1840s, drawing on portrait conventions in other media”. Kratz, Corinne: The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition, Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press 2002: 118; cf. also Trachtenberg, Alan: Reading American Photographs, New York: Hill and Wang 1989: 24–26.


makes us as ‘readers’ of these photographs uncertain about how to interpret them. The ‘voice’ of photographed soldiers is thus silenced, but not taken away from them – the fact that we do not hear it makes us aware that these voices may be very diverse.

The photograph below may be taken as a metaphor of the time when both the fixed and ritualized nature of the studio photography practice and solidity of the Yugoslav army institution were already disintegrating; it seems to be a product of inertia and still present wider social expectations that could not be fulfilled any more.

Ill. 11: A photo of a JNA soldier on the eve of the dissolution of Yugoslavia

The photo above was most probably taken in the 1980s, when the Yugoslav army lost much of its reputation as the “forge of Yugoslavism” and its firm structure already began to shake. At the same time, more precisely in 1986, Slovenian art photographer Jane Štravs took a number of portraits of JNA soldiers while performing his own military service in Belgrade. Three of them were later chosen to appear in his book of photographs in a series titled “JNA soldiers” and in the gallery on his website.23

23 Štravs, Jane: Photographic Incarnations, Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003. And:

www.stravs.net.

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Ill. 12-14: Yugoslav People’s Army soldier I-III (Jane Štravs: Photographic Incarnations.)

The personalized black-and-white portraits were taken in an apparently non-official situation, which is most strongly suggested by the way soldiers wear the uniform. Featuring soldiers in front of a tarpaulin dressed in shab-by gray uniforms, the photographs are reminiscent of the military photog-raphy genre – so much so that they unexpectedly, even absurdly, begin to remind us of Partisan photographs. The production of JNA photos of this genre, quite different from what JNA photos were several decades before, was only made possible after significant changes took place in the social and political economies in the former Yugoslavia. In this particular case, artistic production should also be placed in the specific Slovenian context of the 1980s. Štravs’ photographs, together with others taken in the 1980s, embody the artist’s critical stance towards social reality: in the words of


Marina Gržinić, “Štravs’ work in the eighties is the re-articulation of life on the margins of a totalitarian structure”.24 The artist is similarly critical of post-socialist reality in the independent Slovenia in photographs taken in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century.

PHOTOGRAPHY AND POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION The above mentioned three portraits of JNA soldiers open a plethora of questions that concern politics of representation, mediation and interpreta-tion. They emphasize the need to address the issues of the politics of repre-sentation which always involves power, knowledge and engagement25 and of representational control, which essentially concerns questions of author-ship and audience26 as well as “questions about rights, authority, and the power to control which voices talk when, how much, in what order, in what language”.27 Practices of selecting and labeling, inherent to exhibitions and collection making, are also integral part of the politics of representation.28 In opposition to ritualized studio portraits discussed above, the three por-traits of JNA soldiers taken by Jane Štravs are highly individualized, with a strong emphasis on the facial expression of the portrayed soldiers. At the first glance, they are also highly realistic, taken in a ‘natural’ setting of the JNA service and in a spontaneous, everyday situation. However, Štravs’s realism is misleading, which is also stressed by Gržinić, who writes that his photographs make us “refuse the early and ‘innocent’ belief that the camera merely presents us with visual facts that were simply ‘out there’ and which are now objectively observed and recorded”.29 Štravs took the three por-traits using a wide-angle lens that slightly deformed the photographed object.30 But in opposition to the studio photographs discussed above,

24 Gržinić, Marina: “Štravs’ photographic incarnations”, in: Jane Štravs, Photo-

graphic Incarnations. Ljubljana: Založba ZRC 2003:7. 25 C. Kratz: The Ones That Are Wanted, 222. 26 Jaffe, Alexandra: “Introduction: Non-Standard Orthography and Non-Standard

Speech”, in: Journal of Sociolinguistics 4.4 (2000): 507. 27 Feld, Steven: “Postscript, 1989”, in: Steven Feld: Sound and Sentiment, Phila-

delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 19902: 241. 28 The consequences of these processes and dilemmas they cause are beautifully

described by C. Kratz: The Ones That Are Wanted. 29 M. Gržinić: “Štravs’ photographic incarnations”, 8. 30 Interview with Jane Štravs, Ljubljana, May 2011.

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where the difference between reality and portrayal was made explicit by the absence of eye contact, Štravs’ portraits suggest that they are realistic, which is also due to the fact that the subjects look directly into camera. Frontal portraits, as Tagg suggested, have often been associated with a “code of social inferiority” and documentation of human beings for diverse scientific, legal and medical purposes.31 Both social hierarchization and ‘othering’ may be read from the three portraits of JNA soldiers. According to Štravs, they can stand for three ‘typical’ former Yugoslav nations and (supposedly) represent a Serb, a Gypsy, and an Albanian (although persons in the photographs were not necessarily members of the stated ethnic groups).

The processes of selection and classification (type making) are then fol-lowed by the process of generalization through labeling: each in the series of the three portraits was labeled “a JNA soldier”. This way, the selected, distorted and (nationally/ethnically) typified portraits become a representa-tion of the JNA as a whole. Although the photographs suggest the opposite, the representation of ethnic types and the use of generalized labels actually erase individuality from the portraits. Štravs’ portraits suggest realism, even though they are not realistic; likewise, they suggest individuality rather than being individualized. Štravs’ images of JNA soldiers possess a distinct voice – but the question remains whose voice it is. In the way these por-traits were made, it becomes irrelevant who the people in the photos really are; the photos were not made for them and they most probably would not see in them images they wanted. What is more, the featured soldiers have also never seen or received the photographs.32 Štravs’ series of photos aimed to provide an artistic critique of Yugoslav socialism in the 1980s, and alert to the hegemonic discourses and practices of the JNA. These individualized and strongly expressive photographs did so effectively, but at the cost of the persons portrayed: to enable the artist to voice a social critique, they first had to be deprived of their own voice and, more im-portantly, of the very possibility to articulate any voice, which made them essentially muted.

31 Tagg, John: The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histo-

ries, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1988: 36-37, 76, 80, quoted after C. Kratz: The Ones That Are Wanted, 122.

32 J. Tagg: “The Burden of Representation”, 36-37, 76, 80, quoted after C. Kratz: The Ones That Are Wanted, 122.


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FILMOGRAPHY KARAULA (UK/SER/ME/CRO/SI/MAK/BA/HUN/AUT 2006, D: Rajko

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Documents

Portraits of Yugoslav Army Soldiers: Between Partisan and Pop-Culture Imagery