A story with roots in the 1970s is coming to final fruition this week. Following a near three decade relationship with Bosnia, Lopez photographer Steve Horn traveled to Travnk this week to see an exhibition of his work open.

The photos on display are the product of this extended relationship; images informed by his concern for the people and the narratives of this area. It begins with a VW bus with built-in dark room, and it closes with a documentary display, and a legacy of friendship and connectivity.

Of course, a college student setting out for Europe in 1970 could have no idea about this. “I applied for a project in field study,” explains Horn, going on to describe how his love of photography sustained weeks of shooting roll after roll of film.

Essentially a project in visual anthropology and documentary, Horn would get up early each morning, shoot, then spend the rest of the day developing the film in the back of the bus. Although traveling widely, Horn says that his creativity was truly sparked with the move into eastern Europe. It was here, in Bosnia, that Horn “found what I really wanted to photograph.” What that turned out to be, was people.

When Horn returned home and stored the negatives from the trip, he was filing away a whole gallery of people. Into the cupboard went a catalog of faces that he thought would remain in storage now the project was complete. It was not to be.

With the advent of the 1992 war in Bosnia, the photos were pulled out for contribution to a development program. The “Fellowship of Reconciliation” saw Bosnian children evacuated out of the war zone and into the USA. Horn is still in touch and friendly with one child who moved to Seattle.

Equally important as his contribution to the aid project, was the re-ignition of Horn’s feelings about the photos. “Once I reconnected with those pictures, I felt like there was some unfinished part of my relationship with them, it wasn’t past. I wanted to do something else with them but I didn’t know what.”

And he wouldn’t know, until 2002 when a multi-day photography workshop with Phil Borges sparked the idea of returning to the places in the photographs. “I said I had never been to Europe since that original trip, and Phil said, you should go back to these places.”

It was an idea that quickly took seed and grew, resulting in his return to Bosnia in fall 2003. The VW bus of the 70’s was replaced by his sadness over the devastation wrecked on the area by war. “At first I was over-whelmed by the devastation, there were burned out houses and grave yards. It was overwhelming and saddening.” It was a feeling, however, that softened as Horn worked to talk to people. In a reverse exercise to ‘taking’ a photo and extracting a scene or image, Horn enjoyed the idea of ‘returning’ a photograph, making his shots from the 70’s available to organizations and working to reconnect with the people he had once photographed.

Through chatting to people at markets or on the street (he had a translator) Horn was able to locate children in certain photos, now of course grown up. “The first person I talked to was the brother of the girl in one of my pictures,” says Horn, describing the luck and effort that went into finding the people.

Those connections stay solid to the present day, with Horn revisiting again in 2008 with his wife and daughter. “We stayed in the home of [one of the children in the photos]…his name is Vernes.”

There were several achievements that came over the years, a book, funded with Lopez community help, and an exhibition that traveled through places like the Bosnian Embassy in Washington D.C before returning to Lopez. However it is with the photo’s formal return for exhibiting in Bosnia that a sense of the story concluding is created.

Horn is collaborating on the project with Fatima Maslic, director of the Travnik Regional Museum, and will move the exhibit to Sarajevo and a several other cities in the fall. He feels pleased that these pictures can return to the place they were taken, and hopes that the subject of the shots can “feel like they are being seen and heard in a different way.” Horn himself looks forward to bringing the story of the photographs full cycle.