When I arrived at the studio, the first thing he commented on was my name.

‘So, you are Jewish.’ He scrutinised me as if about to take my portrait. ‘Sephardic like our Sarajevo Jews.’

‘Am I?’

There was a young boy whom he employed to make coffee for him and to clean the studio while he worked, and this child – he was perhaps fourteen years old – had been preparing the coffee over the stove when I arrived, boiling it up and letting it cool again, boiling it up, letting it cool. The boy, who didn’t say a word all the time I was visiting, handed me some coffee in a small cup and I took it from him and looked around the studio, as Mevludin continued talking. The photographer was speaking to me with his back turned as he searched for something in the shelves he had by the window – large wide shelves which held numerous black box files, each identified with a date and a few cryptic notes written in a mixture of alphabets: Cyrillic, Arabic, Roman. Mevludin opened one box file, then another, then another, all the time talking about the Sephardic family of his son’s new wife. I was saying something in a vague and surprised and non-committal way about my own Abrahamic roots, when he turned to me with a print in his hands.

‘It was one of the first photographs I took and the first I ever developed. I went out into the street on that first day after returning with my box from Vienna – and bam! These Jewess ladies. I had to persuade them to stand there, ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, as I adjusted the shutter and the aperture and they adjusted their headscarves. I fed the little girl sweets and promised her an ice cream. And then, at the last minute, as everybody was losing patience with my new box, the sun went behind a cloud and the light was perfect. The three women stopped squinting and smiled, and I took the picture. In that moment I knew that I would become a photographer, the best one in the whole of Yugoslavia.’