By Damir Sagolj

It is twenty years since the man was killed. His remains were given different names; he became just a number in sad statistics – one of ours or theirs. Behind the broken window of his burnt home, between grave marks of innocents only ghosts live.

I don’t have any of my pictures from the 1992-95 war in Bosnia anymore. I shot many photos – mostly of dead people and destruction. Very few had any life in them. Then, just as the killings stopped and a different war continued in November 1995 I abandoned my photos; I didn’t want to have them anymore.

Not a smart move, but it was what I wanted at the moment – to forget, to put it behind, to move forward.

All I have now are the cracks in my memory to peek through and imagine lives before we became just numbers. Only the weed grows around ruins, just like nails and hair on the dead bodies – the reminder.

I had all my photos in one room, at my former army unit on Vrazova street, Sarajevo. I would walk past that building every day. All I had to do was to use the key I kept for many years and pick up my film. I didn’t. Then a rich man bought the building and my archive went where I wanted it to go – into the trash.

By Damir Sagolj

An angel-like girl, dressed all in white carries a pack of toothbrushes on a Sunday morning. She walks slowly, smiles all around and seems not to be bothered by music so loud that one can’t hear his own thoughts. She is on her way to the Mang Teung Sua Jung Cemetery in Chonburi province – where members of a local Thai Chinese community will exhume unclaimed bodies. Toothbrushes will be used to clean the dirt from bones.

One of the first books I read after arriving in Thailand more than two years ago was Bizarre Thailand – a collection of strange tales from the “land of smiles”. It was a nice introduction to what I could expect here in Thailand but I thought to myself – I’ve seen enough elsewhere; bizarre things in other countries so nothing can surprise me.

Well, this is Thailand and things go well beyond expectations. On this day, unclaimed dead bodies are taken out of graves in the corner of a massive cemetery in Choburi province. It is a Thai Chinese ritual that has been going on for decades since diseases like malaria killed many people 90 years ago in the province. The legend goes that officials began haphazardly digging up corpses so the city could build an airport and stopped only when they were haunted by ghosts. Since then, residents have felt it necessary to leave the land untouched and to honor those who have died without loved ones.

Photographer Damir Sagolj won second place in the multimedia story section of the POYi awards for the following piece on the aftermath of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011.

View more of Damir’s photographs from Japan here.

I started this little “pet project” that will take me who knows where.

It is about Pattaya, a magnet for foreign tourists seeking sun, sea, watersports and racy nightlife not far from Bangkok. Andrew Marshall calls it Sin City, Sodom-on-Sea, the Gomorrah of Tomorroh in his article for Time magazine.

It was just a simple, sleepy fishing village before Americans turned it into something very different – a R&R destination for their soldiers fighting in Vietnam. The rest is legend.

Americans left, the war against communism was over, but Pattaya stayed what it used to be, attracting “the worst kind of Western tourists” as the travel books suggested.

Well, and Russians, too. They also had “an issue” with communism that belongs to the past. Now, they are new dear guests locals “love long time,” and American signs are changing to the Russian language. In Pattaya, there are no losers – only winners swapped at the throne. Its privileged status, sometimes above or beside the laws, guarantees the win-win situation.

If you like that kind of game.

By Damir Sagolj

She killed her husband by giving him six daughters. In the land of warriors, drug lords and brutal highlanders – he wanted a son. And then he just died disappointed, Moe Mohm said, leaving her to grow opium and raise girls.

By the fireplace, obviously the central point of a household high in the mountains of the Shan state, Moe sits and talks to us in a frantic combination of laughter and tears. She is an ethnic Pa-O and wears a towel above her pretty face with teeth ruined by betel nut. Only a glance at her hands reveals real age and hard work in fields. The house seems to be okay – humble but well kept and clean.

I take a few pictures just to get her accustomed to the camera. There will be a turn in her story as she talks through her life to the first journalists she has ever met and I want to capture the moment when it comes. It might take a while, but I know how to wait.

Here is another episode to think about, a real one with very real people. Not long ago, in a different country with similar problems, two colleagues, both photographers (it could be me), drove to a refugee center to join genocide survivors watching the TV appearance of one of those accused for the killings at a war crimes court. They knew it would be a strong moment. As they approached the village, one of them says to the other who is driving “stop by a grocery shop, I want to buy onion”. The other one, with a huge question mark above his head asks “why” to get a straight answer – to make a woman cry, to make our picture better. “WHF, what about moral and ethics, are you out of your mind“, argues the driver. The answer is another difficult question and makes you think – is it easier with onion or to ask all the questions, to torture and make the woman go through the horror of her past just to get that tear, only to make a picture better, more real?

How do you feel, I ask my colleague who sits next to me as we interview Moe Mohm, knowing the moment will come if we ask the right questions?

Reuters photographer Damir Sagolj won first prize in the World Press Photo Daily Life Singles category with his photograph of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung on a wall in Pyongyang.

Below, he recounts taking the photograph.

“After days of excitement and lots of rare pictures in the provinces, I came back to Pyongyang without big plans for shooting in the capital. All I wanted were some moody general views of the city. This is probably the easiest big picture I shot for a long time – it was taken from the window of my hotel room in Pyongyang early morning, just before the sunrise. I knew that portrait was there and I insisted with our hosts to get a room on a very high floor facing that direction. So, all I had to do is to wake up early in the morning, make a coffee, light a cigarette and make sure I exposed well. The scene has this eerie look for maybe 5 to 10 minutes, then the revolutionary songs and propaganda speeches from loudspeakers wake the city up.”

Canon 5D Mark II, lens 70-200mm, f4, 1/60, ISO 800

Caption: A picture of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung decorates a building in the capital Pyongyang early October 5, 2011. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

To see more of Damir’s photography from North Korea click here.

By Damir Sagolj

In the beginning it was business as usual. Children played in the water, women moved around on makeshift rafts and people ignored the rising water from the north of Thailand. There were lots of smiling faces and very few worried ones. Looking from the outside, one could say people were having fun and soon all would be forgotten.

Then, suddenly it was not fun any more. As the murky water rose and moved towards the capital it was obvious the scale of this year’s floods would be something very few expected. The land of smiles turned into the land of worry, then anger.

Pictures of destruction and despair were on every corner, the joy and smiling faces had begun to fade-out. We witnessed catastrophe and damage on a scale that would be difficult to calculate. The floods in Thailand occur every year and they hit the same provinces at about the same time. People know what to expect, and some have even use to it. But, what happened in the past two months left everyone totally shocked.