The Visual Archive Southeastern Europe collects historical visual material from Southeastern Europe and makes it available to the wider public online. This publication project was initiated by the Department of Southeastern European History and Anthropology at the University of Graz. The cooperation with the SIBA project of the University of Basel enabled the database to expand significantly.

The database of several thousand photographs includes photographs, postcards, posters, and film stills from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Austria, Romania, Serbia, and Turkey. The English-language edition includes precise image descriptions and commentary, a glossary that allows cross-referencing between cities and languages, keywording based on the international Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) standard, short biographies of the photographers, and full-text search capabilities.
 

Currently, VASE consists of three areas, simultaneously representing three research projects:

VIF: This collection, currently the largest in the database, stems from the research project “Visualizing Family, Gender Relations, and the Body: The Balkans, approx. 1860–1950,” which was conducted by Barbara Derler, Ana Djordjević, and Anelia Kasabova at the University of Graz between 2010 and 2014 under the direction of Karl Kaser. The focus is on early Bosnian, Bulgarian, and Serbian studio photography, as well as postcards from the holdings of the Bosniak Institute in Sarajevo.

SIBA: With the re-launch of the database as a Graz and Basel collaborative project in June 2016, exciting photographic material, some of it published for the first time, was added from the Basel SIBA project. Contributions by Natasa Miskovic, Joël Laszlo, Milanka Matic, Mehmed A. Aksamija, Cengiz Kahraman, Kristina Ilic, and Yorick Tanner provide insight into press photography in Yugoslavia and Turkey during the interwar period. A special gem is the work of Bosnian photographer Alija M. Aksamija from 1938–1939, published here for the first time.

BACI: The Balkan Cinema collection is the result of research undertaken by Prof. Karl Kaser in autumn 2015. His original aim was to collect visual material to illustrate his monograph ‘Hollywood in the Balkans’, which was in the final phase of writing. The accommodating staff at the various archives he visited allowed him to collect much more material than needed for the book. Thus, the idea emerged to establish the BACI collection for VASE.