I am not very good at ‘Travel Photography’. Especially not at the speed at which we ‘travel’ today. I have to at least feel that I have the slightest of grips on a place, its people and the etiquette of taking photographs, which can vary greatly over short distances, to be able to share the story of a place and its people rather than simply observe it. That understanding, I feel, is an unspoken contract and permission for you to create freely rather than to steal subversively.

I found myself stopped in Belgrade, longer than I had planned in the middle of one of the hottest summers ever recorded across the European continent. The sun beat down overhead and I wanted to hide in the shade, drinking the local beer and nurse my cloudy mood about the delay in moving on, feeling that my time in Belgrade was neither long enough for me to get to grips with the city but too long to not have captured something of the place.

Something had to be done. The next morning I met Marko on the side of the main road approaching a bridge over Sava.

Having grown up in the blocks of New Belgrade he guided me round for the day, showing me where he had gone to school, the Sava Centre where Serbia worked to display itself as a country ready for the future and giving me a little insight to New Belgrade’s current residents, some that gave the impression that the modern world they had been promised was just around the corner and others resigned to the fact that it had never come and that the world have moved on.

MR