Sombre Beauty

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As I end these reflections, I wonder if I am not the last person to commend Jutta Benzenberg’s long years of work on Albanian themes. The pictures contained in Sombre Beauty represent the quintessence of experiences lived over a period of more than thirteen years, but particularly intensely over the last five years of Jutta’s time in Albania. The album is made up of the most revealing of the hundreds of portraits of children, youngsters and older people, or of the numerous tableaux that have appealed to Jutta’s nature, from the Dukagjin to the Puka Highlands, from the muddy roads of Shkodra to the chaotic streets of Tirana and the abandoned tracks of the South, from the camps of the Kosovar refugees to the new kindergartens and schools where hopes for a better future may for all we know be thriving. These photographs are now offered to a wider public, to people who we trust will share the desire to better understand the people of Albania.

In Sombre Beauty, I find many stories, of Albania’s more recent history – the war of independence, the veterans, the monuments, followed by the transition, this endless, wearisome Albanian transition – as well as of the more distant history that I have discussed. Each and every one of the portraits in this album deserves to be accompanied by its own story, but for now Jutta’s photographs must speak for themselves.

Ardian Klosi