Alongside the photographs, Eek gives detailed recollections of her and Backer’s interactions with the people of Isniq — with whom she still has close contact — and historical accounts of life in 1970s Kosovo.

In 2019, Eek’s photographic work in Isniq was displayed in an exhibition at the Gallery of the Ministry of Culture, in Prishtina.

K2.0 met with Ann Christine Eek via Zoom to talk about her photography, the time she spent with Backer in Isniq and her unceasing search for the right composition and light.

K2.0: In the book, you describe your first meeting with the Norwegian anthropologist Berit Backer in Durrës, Albania in the summer of 1975. It was there that your friendship with her began and you planned a joint photography project in the village of Isniq. Why were you in Albania?

Ann Christine Eek: At the time, I was working as a documentary photographer. I had made a book about women who worked professionally while also taking care of their children and families. It was titled, “Work — don’t wear yourself out!” When I published it, a friend of mine said, “Why don’t we try to go to Albania and see if we can do some rapportage there?” But we never managed to.

I ended up traveling there with a group from Sweden and Norway. The trip down took an incredibly long time. We had to wait at the border until it was dark because we were not supposed to see anything on the busride.

We arrived at about 11 o’clock at night. We hadn’t had food for about 18 hours and people were getting crazy. I managed to find who was responsible for the arrangements. It was Berit Backer and she was just fantastic. I mean, at 11 o’clock at night she had managed to open the kitchen and fix food for about 40 people.

We started talking and it turned out that her father had been a photographer. She told me she was an anthropologist, but she took a lot from her father. I asked her what she had been doing and she told me about her fieldwork in Isniq — she was about half way into it. I had heard a radio program some months ago about extended families. There was a Croatian reporter who went with some Swedish people to this village where you had this family of about 105 people. So, I kind of understood what she was talking about, though there were not such big families in Isniq.

I asked her if we could go and make a book together. I knew nothing about Kosovo at the time, almost no one knew anything about it. And no one talked about Kosovo in Albania. It was kind of a new world that opened up to me and I started to prepare myself by reading. I got Edith Durham, Margaret Hasluck and some other authors, but it was all so new to me.

When Berit was back in Norway in January 1976, I went there to spend New Year’s Eve with some friends and I met her. We started talking, planning and trying to find out how to finance the trip. Back then I lived in Stockholm, in Sweden, and she lived in Norway. But I had friends in Norway, so I came here quite often. Berit and I did a lot of back and forth trips. She came to Stockholm, I went to Oslo and finally we managed to get a contract with Swedish television. They wanted us to make a film. However, that film is full of mistakes and incorrect facts, so let’s just forget about it [laughs].

Can you talk a bit more about the film? Why was it full of mistakes and what has happened to it?

I think because Berit had not started to write her thesis yet. She had been in Isniq for a year, walking around and talking to people. It was difficult for her to get into the oda. She needed to hear the men’s discussions about the economy and politics. I think she wrote somewhere that she managed to take part in just five meetings in the oda. So after the film was done, when she was writing her thesis, she realized that there were mistakes in the film. Also, we exposed a bit too much information about some people and she had friends in Isniq who were really furious with her because of that. When I started writing this book, I looked through the film and I said no, let’s just forget about it.

Ann Christine Eek: My book on Isniq is the most important work I've done

Swedish photographer talks 1970s Kosovo, village life and her new book.

Lirika Demiri

Ann Christine Eek: My book on Isniq is the most important work I've done

Swedish photographer talks 1970s Kosovo, village life and her new book.

Lirika Demiri