Dissertation - Sarajevo 1992: Recognising Yourself in a Distant War

An article by Adrian Brown for BBC news entitled Sarajevo 1992: Recognising Yourself in a Distant War. Accessible at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21519450

The subject of the article, Vladimir Vrnoga, describes how seeing an image of himself from the war in Bosnia in 1992 brought back all the memories associated with that troubled time in his life. He describes specific sensations such as "feeling the gelatin on my lips, feeling that protein in my belly" from searching for and eating snails, and "the dampness of air of that day". He says of the photograph, "as soon as I saw it the whole thing...came back to me" and "I was right there in that moment". Brown describes Vrnoga's reation when first seeing the image and the effect it has had on his opinion of his home town:

Discovering the photograph had a profound effect on him. Alerted to it by a friend, he found that just looking at it was enough to give him goose bumps and "a flow of blood to his chest". Memories came flooding back too, including many bad ones - of friends "who just vanished" or took their own lives, and the many horrendous sights on the battlefield.
He has no intention of returning to his home city.
"To visit, perhaps. To live? Never."

It seems that photographs can bring back unwelcome memories as much as positive ones - times that we may have repressed memories from can come flooding back to us in the present day when prompted by a visual images that confirms to us what really happened.