patrick rohr.

photojournalist

The young Bosnian Ramo was 14 when he was taken to a Serbian prisoner of war camp.

Unlike so many other boys and men in his home town of Srebrenica, he survived. He tries to forget; starting anew every day. His life is a continual struggle, and he is proud to be unscathed so far. He works as a gardener for people in his home town, which is still ravaged by war. It makes no difference who the gardens belong to, Serbs or Bosnians. There is no life without oblivion.

This is hard in a town where the worst genocide since the second world war took place. Eight thousand Bosnian boys and men were taken away by Serbian opponents in 1995, barbarically killed and buried in the woods around Srebrenica. To this day, not all the bodies have been found and properly buried. The woman in the picture lost two sons, her husband, her brother and his two sons.

Many young people in Bosnia have only one dream: to emigrate.

But even more want to stay. Otherwise who will be there to rebuild the deeply traumatised country? The post-war generation also has nothing to forget.

I'd like to go back to Bosnia. Since my first visit in summer 2016, this country and its history have been a constant preoccupation.

Ukraine.

Ukraine is a relatively young country. Almost thirty years after the break-up of the Soviet Union, it is more divided than ever. War is raging in the east between pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainian nationalists. Domestic politics is a struggle between forces who want rapprochement with the EU and those who want to remain independent. Society is riven between conservative Christian circles and progressive liberal modernisers. A multimedia confrontation with a country on a blood-stained quest for its identity.

Japan.

Japan is a country of real contradictions – which are increasingly leading to impossible tension. The struggle between tradition and modernity, eastern and western living, protecting and opening up the country poses great challenges. The economy is crashing, the population dying off. A photo-essayistic approach to an elusive country.

Chernobyl.

After the devastating Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, hundreds of thousands of people were resettled from the so-called circle of death – an area with a 30-kilometre radius around the failed reactor – to anonymous big cities in Ukraine. Not all the migrants accepted this willingly: they fought by stealth to return to their former homes, where some of them still live today, surrounded by deserted and dilapidated villages. A photographic visit to the widows of Chernobyl.