Killing for a Photograph

Description

During the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, the trial of Bosnian Serb Goran Jelisic exposed a complex and confounding story revolving around the photographers who captured one of Jelisic’s executions. The image of a man being gunned down on the street in Brcko, Bosnia, in 1992 grabbed the world’s attention and ended up winning the 1993 World Press Photo awards Spot News prize. Barbara Matejčić’s yearslong investigation reveals how there is often much more to an image than meets the eye. Through archival research and numerous interviews, Matejčić’s Killing for a Photograph, which won the 2026 European Press Prize Special Award, does more than report on the horrors of war; it questions journalistic motivation and responsibility, a topic that resonates today in our era of “fake news” and AI-generated imagery. This is the definitive English-language translation, which includes additional unpublished writing by Matejčić’s, as well as an introduction by renowned war correspondent Janine di Giovanni.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barbara Matejčić is an award-winning freelance journalist, nonfiction writer and audio producer focused on the Balkan region, based in Croatia

Janine di Giovanni is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished foreign correspondents of her generation. She is the Executive Director and CEO of The Reckoning Project, a transnational war crimes documentation initiative she co-founded in 2022. Over a career spanning more than three decades, di Giovanni has reported from nearly every major conflict zone of our time. She was the Senior Foreign Correspondent for the Times of London as well as a contributing writer to the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Harpers, New York Review of Books, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and many others.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Matt Robinson, born in the UK in 1978, lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Formerly a foreign correspondent with Reuters, he now works as a freelance editor and literary translator. His published translations include Ivan Vidak’s Radio Siga and Jurica Pavicic’s Red Water.