Photo: A master's degree candidate in the classics department, Sue Carl will be honored at the Pentagon for photos of a mass execution site in Bosnia. Photo by Paul Efland.
By Phil Williams
When she found the bodies, Susan Carl began taking pictures.
Through her lens this past April, she saw the remains of more than 100 Muslim men massacred near a small village in Bosnia. She had not been led to the site by military personnel--she discovered it. With small-arms fire audible in the nearby hills and with mines planted everywhere like a spring crop, she steadily went about her business and captured horrifying images that would stay with her long after she had left the country.
Those images, taken for the European edition of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, led to an unexpected honor for Carl. A UGA student working on a master's degree in classics, she was named U.S. Military Photographer of the Year. She also won second-place awards in two other categories, Portrait/Personality and Pictorial. It is the first time the Military Photographer of the Year award has ever been given to a woman. Carl will be honored in ceremonies May 16 at the Pentagon.
"She will be honored here on May 16, and then she will go down in history," says Robert Crockett, program coordinator for the contest at the Defense Information School in Ft. Meade, Md.
"It hasn't really sunk in yet," Carl said after being told of the honor. "It's too overwhelming to think about."
Combat photo veteran
Her tour of duty in Bosnia was not her first time as a combat photographer. Indeed, she is a veteran of the Gulf War, where she served as a military photographer during an eight-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy.
The startling black-and-white images of the dead in Bosnia were taken while Carl, a member of the Naval Reserve, was on a volunteer mission to that war-ravaged country. In constant danger, she went about the country with Stars and Stripes reporter Karen Blakeman, looking for stories to report. Carl was already a master's degree student at UGA when she took leave to return to active duty as a reservist.
"We were assigned to live in an apartment in Tuzla, and we just found our own stories," says Carl. "We did follow up on stories released from the Joint Information Bureau, but I had wanted all along to find a mass grave site. I wanted people to know what was happening."
Mass grave site discovery
Through her sources, Carl learned that there was a mass-killing site near the town of Srebrenica, and she ventured out at least twice without finding it. On her last attempt, however, her Volkswagen had a flat tire, and while it was being repaired she discovered a human femur in the road.
On the next trip out, she found evidence of genocide. Scouting the area, she stumbled on the terrifying site where more than 100 bodies remained unburied after a massacre more than 10 months before.
"If the police had found me, it would have been pretty bad," says Carl calmly. "And it would have been even worse if some of the gun-toting locals had found me. But this site was unbelievable. There were actual tracks over the bodies where someone had run over them with tractors. The dead were all Muslim men who had fled through the mountains the year before. The women and children had been left behind. It was really hard to take photographs of them, but I have a good ability to repress my feelings while I work. I didn't think until later that the whole area was mined."
"Sue is certainly one of our department's bright lights, one of our most energetic and dependable students," says Rick LaFleur, head of the classics department. "She is also one of our most modest graduate students. Her interest is in archaeology, with a special interest in the real world of the Greeks and Romans. In a sense, she wants to see how the ancient world and our world are one and the same. She simply has an extraordinary interest in people."
Carl's interest in archaeology led her to serve as a photographer for four summers on UGA-sponsored excavations in ancient Carthage.
"I love classics because it's so intellectually intense," she says. "I felt as if I'd done the physically intense side of life, so it was time to do the other part."
When she finishes her degree in June, Carl will join a European agency called Action Press as a freelance photographer, though she is still looking for a position with a relief agency. She hopes to return to Bosnia or to visit Albania or other hot spots.
"My family's not that pleased about my decision, but they know that's the way I am," she says. "Working in the States would just kill me. When I was in Bosnia, it was the happiest I've ever been. I want to help people, and I knew that this is what I should be doing with my life."
