Paolo Pellegrin - Kosovo 1999-2000. The Flight of Reason - 2002

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HIGHLY IMPRESSIVE AND VERY RARE TITLE by legendary Italian Magnum photographer
Paolo Pellegrin - showing his Kosovo photos in 1999 and 2000.

COMPLETE WITH THE DUSTJACKET.

Paolo Pellegrin's images of the AIDS epidemic in Uganda won him the World Press Photo first prize in 1995. These photographs of Kosovo won a World Press Award in the "People in the News" Section in 2000. Since then he has continued to win world awards, and became a nominee member of Magnum in 2001, when he won the EuroFuji/Italy Award and the Leica Medal of Excellence.

"I'm more interested in a photography that is 'unfinished' — a photography that is suggestive and can trigger a conversation or dialogue. There are pictures that are closed, finished, to which there is no way in."
- Paolo Pellegrin -

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"In this photographic record of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Paolo Pellegrin has captured the hopeless, helpless plight of the refugees and their long walk to safety through the bare and beautiful countryside of that ravaged land.
In the corridors of power there are contemplative and satisfactory murmurs after the catastrophe of the Balkans. They wink at each other; we have fooled most of the people most of the time, and therefore we have won. Never mind the dead; never mind the hatred; never mind the dispossessed.
Now the Italian photographer Paolo Pellegrin has, for the first time, given the lie to these congratulations. For in Kosovo 1999-2000 he has documented the abject misery of the war, of the dislocation of reason, and of peoples, tribes, homes and society with no redress to Belgrade, London or Washington.
By the end of the war almost 850,000 people out of a total population of two million had been displaced. In one night alone tens of thousands were rounded up by their Serb oppressors in Pristina and expelled on trains. And when the Albanians returned to Kosovo after the bombing their vengeance was swift.
For those lost souls their villages were closed forever - they were bombed to rubble. There were no streets anymore; there were no gardens anymore; there were no hearths, or food to cook on them. There was, God forbid, no hope, only the pathetic and desperate locomotion of ruptured limbs across a landscape stark and terrible."
(from the publisher)

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Trolley, London. 2002. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover with dustjacket. 240 x 240 mm. 148 pages. 60 photos in black and white. Photos: Paolo Pellegrin. Text: Tim Judah. Text in English.

Condition:
Book inside and outside fresh and flawless, clean with no marks and with no foxing; normal trace of use. Dustjacket fresh and complete with no missing parts; light trace of use. Overall very fine condition.

Scarce photobook by Paolo Pellegrin - with the original dustjacket.

"Paolo Pellegrin was born in 1964 in Rome. He studied architecture at the Università la Sapienza, and later photography at the Istituto Italiano di Fotografia. He became a Magnum Photos nominee in 2001 and a full member in 2005. He was a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine for 10 years.
Pellegrin has won many honors, including ten World Press Photo awards, numerous Photographer of the Year awards, a Leica Medal of Excellence, an Olivier Rebbot Award, the Hansel–Mieth-Preis, and the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award. In 2006, he was assigned the W. Eugene Smith Fund Grant.
He has produced a number of books, including Kosovo, 1999–2000: The Flight of Reason (2002), As I Was Dying (2007), Double Blind (2007), Dies Irae (2011), Heart of Darkness (2015), and the colossal collaboration with fellow Magnum photographer Alex Majoli, Congo (2015). In 2022, at Gallerie d’Italia in Turin, Pellegrin exhibited an extensive project on climate change, featuring work from around the world.
Paolo Pellegrin lives in Geneva and continues to shoot for news publications and magazines, as well as personal projects."
(Magnum's website)