There is nothing exotic or heartbreaking about the roughly two dozen photographs in Susan Nolan's exhibit "Budi Normal," on view at the Walsh Gallery of Seton Hall University until Feb. 26. And that seems to be the point. The literal translation of the title in English is "just be normal," but I like the figurative title better: "chill." 

In a world that's been focused for a decade—on multiple fronts and with decidedly mixed success—on the War on Terror, the conflict known as the War in Bosnia, which ran from May 1992 until November 1995, seems brief, comprehensible, almost quaint. We may not have understood entirely who was to blame for the seesawing violence, the mass executions and ethnic cleansing that took place, but at least it had a location, a cast of identifiable parties, a beginning and an end. It was grounded in concepts we could put our hands, and our lenses, on—tribe, boundary, blood—rather than ever shape-shifting ideology.

The images that were consumed by the American public of that war, while effective in garnering sympathy for civilians, had a depressing sameness to them: Families huddled in their barren kitchens while snipers in the streets chipped off the sides of buildings. A teenager darting between cars to make it to a pock-marked school or coffee shop in one piece.

So it comes as almost startling to view these images of young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina who are dancing, relaxing, making music and art—in short, chilling, albeit under economic circumstances that make the recession here at home seem like "Who Still Has a Pretty Good Shot at Becoming a Millionaire."

Susan Nolan, an American professor of psychology at Seton Hall, lived for 15 months in BiH, as the region is known, in 2005 and 2006, and has returned every summer since then. Because of the number of her visits and the fact that she is married to a native, Ivan Bojanic, she was able to gain access to people and situations that Americans rarely see. There is no pretense of journalistic distance in these images; Nolan made friends here, and she unabashedly shares her photo album with us.

And the friends she's made seem pretty cool. There is, for instance, Boro, who inherited a tiny flour mill in the Bosnian Mountains from his father. A cross between Grizzly Adams and Bono, he built a series of cabins on his property for painter and musician friends and now hosts an "eco-camp" and jazz festival that attracts hundreds each year. His mountain artists' colony is called Zelenkovac ("Green Place") and is considered by many to be "the sanest place in Bosnia."

There are also multiple images representing the three-year-old Bosnian short film festival, Kratkofil (Kratko means "short"), including "Darija," the very pregnant founder and director of the event, resting in a bean bag chair in the festival lobby. A subtext running through the exhibit is that women here frequently hold positions of power, even in the male-dominated arts, an idea that American cultural institutions could use some catching up on.

Most of Nolan's images are more interesting for the stories behind her subjects than technique. An exception is a pair of colorful photos taken in a popular nightclub. Entitled "Boom Boom Boom," one depicts a lone girl entering the venue; the other finds the busy DJ inside and his audience dancing at their tables. They show blurry, throbbing movement rendered in deep greens, blues and reds and seem to exactly capture that heady experience.

Like so many Americans today, Nolan's subjects exist in a "gig economy"; their gigs, though, seem just a little more interesting than ours. There are environmental activists who moonlight as bartenders, cultural attaches who are costume designers on the side. What's conveyed through all this multi-tasking, surprisingly, is a lack of cynicism, an openness to new ideas and blended identities. They may not have the latest technology or the fattest paychecks, but they dance, they create, they socialize. Things are normal.

Nowhere is this captured more effectively than in the aptly titled "Connecting with the World," in which Sinisa, a DJ, musician and pop culture journalist who bears a remarkable resemblance to Sting, listens with delight to "what may have been the first ipod in Banja Luka." The year is 2009.

Budi Normal: Photos from Bosnia and Herzegovina by Susan Nolan. On view at The Walsh Library, Seton Hall University, 400 South Orange Ave., NJ, 07079, through Feb. 26, 2010. Open Mon-Fri, 10:30am to 4:30pm, or call the gallery at 973-275-2033.