Amra Efica (1993)
Sandra Balsells photographed Amra Efica on August 26th, 1993 in a gloomy public health institute in Mostar, at the height of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The young woman was the spitting image of a badly wounded Madonna, so Balsells approached her in search of her complicity before taking the picture.
At the time, Sandra was being held hostage together with a small group of journalists who had entered Mostar in a Spanish military convoy to provide humanitarian aid. The civilian population, in a desperate attempt to stop the attacks against them, held both the military and journalists.
The stills she obtained from Amra remained forgotten in the photographer’s files for years: the lack of light caused a technical imperfection. When she was working on her book Balkan in Memoriam, she retrieved that photograph and she felt as overwhelmed as she the day she took it.
Thanks to a documentary project, ten years later Sandra was reunited with the woman in the photograph. She discovered that Amra had clung to life despite the ravages of war.
This work says a lot about the way Sandra approaches reality: getting to know her main subjects, with the utmost respect for the facts, always in search of the other person’s complicity. That is what fuels her.
Sandra Balsells
Barcelona, 1966
Sandra Balsells graduated in Journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and after completing a postgraduate degree in photojournalism in London, she started working as a freelancer, covering war conflicts such as the one in Yugoslavia. Her work on the war and post-war period in this area won her the 2006 Ortega y Gasset Award for Best Informative Work. Balsells has combined her work as photojournalist with teaching at the Ramón Llull University in Barcelona and has participated in dozens of solo and group exhibitions.
