Quest for Identity by Ziyah Gafic

Ziyah Gafic was born in Sarajevo in 1980 and grew up during the siege of the city, briefly becoming a refugee before returning home through a tunnel beneath the airport. He is today Director of The VII Foundation Sarajevo, an award-winning photojournalist, TED speaker, and contributor to National Geographic. Over twenty-six years, he has reported across the Middle East, the Caucasus, Africa, the Balkans, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia, with a sustained focus on societies shaped by conflict and on Muslim communities worldwide. His work has received awards from World Press Photo, Visa pour l’image, Les Rencontres d’Arles, the Prince Claus Fund, the Hasselblad Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and has been published as cover stories in the New York Times, Newsweek, National Geographic, GEO, Le Monde, La Repubblica, and El Mundo. In 2026, he received a knighthood from the Republic of France for his contribution to Arts and Literature.

Quest for Identity is Gafic’s signature body of work, a meticulous photographic archive of personal objects recovered from mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Each object, a key, a comb, a shoe, is photographed with the same exacting precision, functioning simultaneously as forensic evidence, as memory, and as an act of quiet restitution to lives erased by atrocity. It is one of the most significant documentary photography projects to emerge from the aftermath of the Bosnian War. de.MO designed and published the book, documentary photography book design in service of a project of profound moral weight, bringing visual rigor and considered design to a body of work that is as important as it is difficult to look at.