The Tears of Sarajevo

This picture was taken early on in Yugoslavia. The boy is crying over the death of his father. It was almost as if the country was crying. It expressed the anguish of the whole country. There was something about the boy that reminded me of myself as a child. We have very similar features. It was as if I became one with the boy in the photo, and it made me weep. I wept over all the death I had seen. I don’t really cry much over the fighters who die, but I do for the civilian casualties and the horrendous wounds that weapons do to the human body. People don’t realize how horrific war is. I used to really get into my pictures, but after that point in Sarajevo, I just stopped. I haven’t gone through any returns since 1990. I don’t even want to look at them.

Christopher Morris: Born in Tampa Florida in 1958 Morris started his career in photography filing other people’s work at the Black Star agency in New York. Since 1984 he has covered conflicts in nearly twenty foreign countries for which work he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal and the Olivier Rebbot award. He is currently a contract photographer for Time magazine, and a founding member of the agency VII.