Exhibit showcases Bosnia and Serbia photographs

NORFOLK — A photography exhibit featuring pictures from Bosnia and Serbia opened Saturday, May 7, at the Norfolk Library.

Some of the photos were taken by Northwest Connecticut native Babs Perkins, who took them over the five months she spent in the region last year. 

Perkins, whose grandfather was born in what is now Slovakia, was “enamored” by the Balkans when she spent four months there in 2012. “It felt familiar,” she said. At the same time she read an article about cheeses going extinct worldwide and thought, “If this is happening in France where they care about cheese, what’s happening here?”

Then Croatia joined the European Union in 2013, creating rippling changes. Perkins decided “she needed to document people doing things the old-fashioned way.” While the cities are modern and people have cell phones and computers, there’s a “different sense of time in the countryside,” said Perkins. “Don’t plan more than one visit a day,” she said. “Because when you show up, you’re going to be there all day.”

 With the help of translators, she talked to farmers and nomadic sheep herders. She met men who would smuggled large sacks of cheese to Italy to sell on roadsides in desperate search of a commercial market. Eighty percent of exports used to go to Croatia, but with “the swipe of a pen,” that changed.

Perkins told the story behind a photo of a cow in a bombed-out train station. “Across the street was a literal honest-to-God minefield,” Perkins said. 

The cow’s owner and her husband had fled in the cover of darkness during the war. They have been making cheese since 1995, only getting electricity five years ago. “The EU comes in with regulations and says, ‘You can’t keep making cheese the way you are because we can’t certify that your kitchen is clean enough,’” she said.

Yet Perkins could eat foods that she couldn’t handle in the America. There are no GMOs, they’re “too poor to buy pesticides,” she said, and they don’t need fertilizers because they don’t completely till the fields. 

“All these things we used to do 100 years ago, and we’re getting back to them,” she said. “I’m not in a position to talk about policy, but if I can start a conversation, take pictures that make people say, ‘I had no idea Bosnia and Serbia were so pretty,’ maybe we pay more attention to our own backyard, maybe when we travel we make a different decision and maybe something changes. I want to tell the stories where there’s still hope, including the in-between moments we usually miss.”

The exhibit runs through Thursday, June 2.