When Wolfgang Bellwinkel and Peter Maria Schäfer photographed Sarajevo in 1994, the city had already endured two years of siege. The Bosnian Serb army, units of the Yugoslav People’s Army and paramilitaries had closed the routes in and out; an airlift kept hundreds of thousands of trapped residents supplied, and the shelling continued until February 1996. Ex Pose Verlag brought out this collection in the same year the photographs were made — a book that appeared while the events it records were still unfolding.

Seventy-six colour photographs by the two German photographers fill its 160 pages. Bellwinkel, born in 1959, and Schäfer both worked in Sarajevo in 1994, and the volume presents their pictures as a shared record rather than a single author’s account. The German title, Krieg in Europa, is paired on the cover with its English equivalent, War in Europe, a bilingual framing that places the Bosnian conflict inside Europe rather than at its edge.

Printing in colour sets the book apart from much of the press imagery of those years, and the timing gives it a particular documentary force. The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days, the longest of the twentieth century; an estimated 11,000 people were killed and 56,000 injured. Photographs made and published in 1994 belong to the middle of that ordeal rather than to its aftermath, and they carry the uncertainty of the moment instead of the retrospective shape later accounts impose.

For collectors, the book is now out of print, and its interest lies less in scarcity than in what it holds: a contemporaneous colour record of the siege, made in the city by two photographers at work there in 1994. Read beside the histories written afterwards, it keeps the pressure of the moment — the airlift, the casualties, the unfinished outcome — inside the frame.