Photojournalist Ron Haviv’s Response to Martin Lukk and Keith Doubt: Bearing Witness and the Limits of War Photojournalism: Ron Haviv in Bijeljina

I write in response to the recent article by Martin Lukk and Keith Doubt on a photograph that I took in 1992 in Bijeljina, Bosnia. Photographs open themselves to interpretation, but this does not mean that one’s interpretations are accurate. This is a basic facet of photography that Lukk and Doubt overlook in their factually inaccurate piece. In the interest of brevity, I will make just a few key points by way of response:

The authors open the piece asserting that I was told by Arkan not to take photographs. This is not correct. I was told over and over again by the soldiers who were in the process of killing people not to take any photographs. Arkan was not on site during this sequence of events. This may seem a small distinction to the authors, but reflects their poor research and lack of knowledge of the situation as it unfolded on the ground.

Later, the authors state: “Why would Arkan invite a photographer to join him unless he wanted a witness, and why would Arkan want a witness?”¹ Asking a rhetorical question is not the same as providing a thoughtful answer. Moreover, the authors are again wrong on detail. My camera was not “a mirror through which Arkan was able to promote his terrifying images to the world,”² as the authors query early in their essay. In reality, when Arkan arrived, he seized my film. The photo in question was on a roll that I smuggled out of the country, in hopes of moving world leaders to action.

One of the most egregious errors in this piece occurs when the authors write: “One wonders, what does the man’s family think when it sees this photograph taken before his death? Despite interviews with people in Bijeljina after the war, the name of this man, who he is, and where he is from remain unknown.”³ In fact, the story of the man in the photo, Hajrush Ziberi from Macedonia, who eventually died on 3 April 1992, was public knowledge before this article came out.⁴ The authors should have done better research or simply asked me. Ziberi’s family thanked me for taking the photograph, telling me it was meaningful to them.

Further, while I understand the authors are trying to problematize the complicated role of witnessing, they have fundamentally misunderstood my goal and my actions that day, stating: “Haviv was not a passive bystander; he was a participant. … [H]e sought out his role.”⁵ Yes, I sought out a role—I was there to document what was happening in the hope that even in a worst case scenario there would be a record of what had occurred. There have been times in my career and my colleagues’ careers when the presence of the witness can change things for the better. But there are also times when no one cares at that moment and terrible actions occur whether we are there or not.

Finally, the authors write:

Viewers, though, see only the man’s fear. His anger is repressed. The man has to resent the control that the photographer has over the telling of the end of his life, where the photographer knows nothing at all about the man’s life, not even his name, and the telling will benefit the professional career of the photographer.⁶

Lukk and Doubt make a bizarre and dangerous move into the space of the imagined—without, at this moment, acknowledging this move—when they intuit what the photo’s subject was feeling. It can be productive, in certain contexts, to interpret what a photo’s subject may have felt, but it can also be very dangerous to unthinkingly project feelings or make assumptions about a subject or the photographer, especially when those suppositions are made with missing or factually inaccurate information. To suggest that this photo was taken to further my career is appalling.

Images of death and near death are always disturbing and there is...