The picture that fooled the world
video clip 464k (download time approx. 3 mins.)
The Broadcast Footage
The original picture was just one clip from a whole sequence of
video footage shot by ITN on 5 August 1992. The broadcast film
shows journalist Penny Marshall approach a barbed wire fence to
find the emaciated figure of the now famous Fikret Alic on the
other side.
To film these refugees, Marshall and her cameraman Irvin entered
a compound next to the camp area. Inside this small compound were
a kind of garage shed, an electricity transformer station and
a brick barn. Before the war, horticultural products could be
bought there and tractors and construction machinery had been
housed in the barn. To protect all this from thieves, the compound
area of approximately 500 square metres had been fenced-in with
barbed wire a couple of years before. The erection of the barbed
wire fence had nothing to do with the refugees, the camp or the
war. The poles to which this barbed wire was attached are still
standing today, and traces of the wire can be found on the west
side of the compound.
When Marshall, Williams and Vulliamy entered the compound next
to the camp, the barbed wire was already torn in several places.
They did not use the open gate, but entered from the south through
a gap in the fence. They approached the fence on the north side,
where curious refugees quickly gathered inside the camp, but on
the outside of the area fenced-in by barbed wire. It was through
the barbed wire fence at this point that the famous shots of Fikret
Alic were taken.
The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims;
it is around the cameraman and the journalists. It formed part
of a broken-down barbed wire fence encircling a small compound
that was next to Trnopolje camp. The British news team filmed
from inside this compound, shooting pictures of the refugees and
the camp through the compound fence. In the eyes of many who saw
them, the resulting pictures left the false impression that the
Bosnian Muslims were caged behind barbed wire.
video clip 223k (download time approx. 1.5 mins.)
The unused footage (too long to reproduce here) shows how cameraman
Irvin zoomed through the compound's barbed wire fence from various
angles, apparently searching for the most dramatic shot. Most
of the refugees in the camp were marked by their experience of
the war, but few looked as emaciated as Fikret Alic. Yet he captured
the camera's attention.
On her return, Penny Marshall wrote in the Sunday Times that 'Jeremy
Irvin, our cameraman, knew he had come away with powerful images
from Prijedor, but only when we screened them in our Budapest
editing suite did we begin to sense their impact'. (16 August
1992)
Ed Vulliamy summarised this impact in his book, Seasons in Hell:
'With his rib-cage behind the barbed wire of Trnopolje, Fikret
Alic had become the symbolic figure of the war, on every magazine
cover and television screen in the world.' (p202)
Mike Jeremy, foreign editor of ITN, later called the picture 'one
of the key images of the war in former Yugoslavia'. (Independent,
5 August 1993)
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