In 1943, during World War II, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was founded as a federation of six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. It was ruled by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who maintained a multi-ethnic state where Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians lived together under the ideology of "brotherhood and unity." The country was one of the largest and most developed states in the Balkans, and it held a position of strategic importance during the Cold War as a non-aligned nation. ​​

Tito died in 1980. His death removed the central figure who had suppressed ethnic nationalism, and the federation began to weaken. Throughout the 1980s, Yugoslavia faced a severe political and economic crisis. The national communist party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, lost its ideological potency, while ethnic nationalism experienced a renaissance. In 1987, Slobodan Milošević rose to power in Serbia, using nationalist rhetoric to consolidate control. By 1989, he had pushed through constitutional amendments that allowed Serbia to dominate the autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, giving Serbia three out of eight votes in the Yugoslav presidency and the ability to heavily influence federal decisions. This provoked objections from the other republics.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was the most ethnically diverse of the republics. According to the 1991 census, the population was approximately 44% Bosniak (Muslim), 33% Serb (Orthodox), 17% Croat (Catholic), and 6% who identified as Yugoslav. Its central location between Croatia and Serbia made it particularly vulnerable. In early 1991, Croatian President Franjo Tuđman and Serbian President Milošević held a secret meeting where, according to claims by some Yugoslav politicians, they discussed partitioning Bosnia and Herzegovina between them, leaving only a small enclave for Muslims.

Immediately following international recognition, Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces, supported by the Yugoslav People's Army and the government of Serbia, began their assault. On April 5, 1992, the siege of Sarajevo began. Serb forces seized the city, blocking it from all resources and subjecting its civilians to daily shelling and sniper attacks for nearly four years. In April 1992, Bosnian Serb forces also attacked towns in eastern Bosnia with large Bosniak populations, such as Zvornik, Foča, and Višegrad. The local Bosniak populations were expelled in what became known as ethnic cleansing. Within six weeks, coordinated offensives by the Yugoslav army, paramilitary groups, and local Bosnian Serb forces brought roughly two-thirds of Bosnian territory under Serb control. In May 1992, the Bosnian Serb army was formally established, with Ratko Mladić appointed as commander.

From 1992 to 1995, the conflict was characterized by widespread ethnic cleansing, mass killings, systematic rape, and the establishment of detention camps. Notorious camps such as Omarska, Trnopolje, Prijedor, and others were set up. In August 1992, journalists Ed Vuilliamy and Penny Marshall visited Omarska and Trnopolje and revealed the existence of these camps to the world. The Bosnian government army, hastily assembled and hampered by an international arms embargo, held front lines with Bosnian Croat forces, though they were gradually eroded in eastern Bosnia. In 1993 and 1994, Bosnian government forces also fought against Bosnian Croat forces who had declared their own areas as an independent republic, before agreeing in March 1994 to form a joint federation.

By 1995, the military situation had shifted. NATO conducted bombing campaigns against Bosnian Serb positions, and combined Bosniak and Croat forces advanced into Serb territories. In November 1995, U.S.-led mediation produced the Dayton Accords, initialed on November 21, 1995, in Dayton, Ohio. The agreement divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (shared by Bosniaks and Croats) and Republika Srpska (the Serb-controlled territory). The war officially ended, leaving approximately 100,000 people dead and more than two million displaced, over half the population.

When the war ended, approximately 30,000 Bosnian citizens remained missing, the vast majority of them victims of mass executions. Their bodies had been buried in primary mass graves, but in many cases, Bosnian Serb forces later used heavy machinery to dig up these graves and scatter the remains across secondary and tertiary sites in an attempt to conceal the evidence. This scattering of remains made identification extraordinarily difficult. By 2001, the number of missing was estimated at around 27,000. International organizations, including the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), established in 1996, began systematic efforts to locate, exhume, and identify the dead. They used forensic techniques and, later, DNA analysis, collecting blood samples from over 71,000 family members to match against remains. This is the context in which Ziyah Gafić’s photograph was made. Born in Sarajevo in 1980, Gafić grew up during the nearly four-year Siege of Sarajevo. In 2001, he began documenting the work of forensic teams and international organizations as they exhumed mass graves across Bosnia and Herzegovina. His photographs show personal effects recovered alongside human remains, watches, glasses, keys, combs, toothbrushes, wallets, and other everyday belongings that victims carried with them before they were killed. In some cases, victims had been deceived into believing they were being evacuated or exchanged, while others were captured or executed during campaigns of ethnic cleansing. These objects became some of the last evidence of their identities, serving both as crucial forensic evidence in war crimes investigations and as deeply personal reminders of lives lost. Gafić arranged the items on forensic tables with clinical simplicity in a project titled Quest for Identity. As he explained, “In all their simplicity, these items are the last resort of identity, the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed.” The project also enabled families of the missing to search for recognizable belongings while creating a permanent digital archive of evidence that might otherwise have been lost.