Review: Sarajevo Seminar for Narrative and Documentary Practice Session 1

Written on November 13, 2019, posted in Review, Sarajevo

Students and tutors of the Sarajevo Seminar for Documentary and Narrative Practice. From left to right: Zijah Gafić, Mitar Simkić, Anđela Petrovski, Imrana Kapetanović, Andrei Pungovschi, Nerma Sofić, Petra Slobodnjak, Aleksandar Slavković, Paul Lowe, Anastas Tarpanov, Armin Graca, Matjaz Rust, Sandra Juniči, Iza Štrumbelj Oblak, Hasnija Zulić, Marko Risović, Dimitris Rapakousis and Ana Paunković.

September 21-28, 2019
Lead Instructors: Dr Paul Lowe and Ziyah Gafic

Sixteen stu­dents attend­ed the intro­duc­to­ry week of the multi-session train­ing pro­gram in inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism.

The first ses­sion of the Sarajevo Seminar for Narrative and Documentary Practice was an ori­en­ta­tion week dur­ing which the par­tic­i­pants were intro­duced to some of the fun­da­men­tal require­ments of inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism. These include con­tem­po­rary method­olo­gies of  doc­u­men­tary and jour­nal­is­tic prac­tice, ethics, basics of writ­ten report­ing (AP style), visu­al lit­er­a­cy, aes­thet­ics and image con­struc­tion. All lec­tures were fol­lowed by in depth Q+A ses­sions.

Marko Drobnjakovic lecturing on the transition from news to long form documentary photography. ©Nerma Sofic
Marko Drobnjakovic lec­tur­ing on the tran­si­tion from news to long form doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­phy. ©Nerma Sofic
Aida Cerkez on news reporting and writing. ©Nerma Sofic
Aida Cerkez on news report­ing and writ­ing. ©Nerma Sofic

After lec­tures, each of the fif­teen stu­dents had one-on-one ses­sions with lead tutors Dr Paul Lowe and Ziyah Gafic, as well as lec­tur­ers Ron Haviv, Marko Drobnjakovic and Sandra Vitaljic. Over the course of a week, stu­dents also pre­sent­ed their own work, par­tic­i­pat­ed in group dis­cus­sions, and had their port­fo­lios reviewed. At the end of the week, stu­dents came up with a top­ic that they want­ed to address as a group—“Displacement / Depopulation.” Each stu­dent will devel­op his or her own indi­vid­ual project as an inter­pre­ta­tion as this theme, and present it dur­ing Session 2 in January 2020.

Ron Haviv listens to a lecture. ©Andjela Petrovski
Ron Haviv lis­tens to a lec­ture. ©Andjela Petrovski
Ziyah Gafic reviews a student's work. ©Hasnija Zulic
Ziyah Gafic reviews a stu­den­t’s work. ©Hasnija Zulic

In the inter­ven­ing weeks between ses­sions, each stu­dent will work in an online men­tor­ing envi­ron­ment with the tutors, pre­sent­ing updates on their projects.

Ziyah Gafic lectures on developing personal visual style. ©Nerma Sofic
Ziyah Gafic lec­tures on devel­op­ing per­son­al visu­al style. ©Nerma Sofic
Tarik Samarah giving students a private tour of Gallery 11/07/95, dedicated to preserving the memory of the Srebrenica genocide. ©Nerma Sofic
Tarik Samarah giv­ing stu­dents a pri­vate tour of Gallery 11/07/95, ded­i­cat­ed to pre­serv­ing the mem­o­ry of the Srebrenica geno­cide. ©Nerma Sofic
Visiting Gallery 11/07/95 with Dr Paul Lowe. ©Nerma Sofic
Visiting Gallery 11/07/95 with Dr Paul Lowe. ©Nerma Sofic
Students during class. ©Nerma Sofic
Students dur­ing class. ©Nerma Sofic
Armin Graca taking notes. ©Nerma Sofic
Armin Graca tak­ing notes. ©Nerma Sofic
The Sarajevo campus of the VII Academy. ©Hasnija Zulic
The Sarajevo cam­pus of the VII Academy. ©Hasnija Zulic