Response to Ron Haviv

Ron Haviv’s response to our article “Bearing Witness and the Limits of War Photojournalism”¹ is a welcome opportunity for dialogue between practitioners and scholars in the fields of visual culture and human rights, and it offers us the chance to clarify the interests and concerns of our work.

First, we wish to stress a consideration we express in the article, namely, Haviv’s courage in taking the photographs in question at considerable risk to his life, and affirm a shared lament that these photographs, as documents that bore witness, did not do more to galvanize world leaders and prevent the violence and injustice that started in Bijeljina in 1992 and spread throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina for four years. This kind of violence and injustice is replicated today in Syria, Iraq, and other sites of conflict, where photojournalists continue to work under dangerous circumstances to create evidence and provoke the world’s compassion. Haviv as a veteran photojournalist suggests there is nothing simple about taking such photographs. We believe him, and we see our work as exploring, from a scholarly perspective, some of the complexity of visually representing war. As the title of our original article indicates, our interest is in the action of bearing witness, as a sociological event, and what this says about the limits of war photojournalism.

Haviv’s response to our article is critical on four points, three empirical and one methodological. Regarding the former, Haviv identifies three instances in which he claims our descriptive account of his activities in Bijeljina, during which he captured the image of the kneeling man, is inaccurate; he suggests these errors indicate a “lack of knowledge of the situation as it unfolded on the ground” and are thus crucial in nature.

Most of the written accounts of Haviv’s work in Bosnia-Herzegovina have highlighted his well-known photograph from Bijeljina of the soldier with sunglasses kicking the body of a murdered civilian. The critic Susan Sontag, for instance, has commented on this photo² and many journalistic accounts of Haviv’s experiences revolve around the circumstances of the photograph’s creation.³ Thus, while the story of that prominent photograph has been explicitly established, the particulars surrounding other images, like that of the kneeling man, are scattered among the many accounts of Haviv’s coverage of Bosnia. In our article, we do the work of compiling details from different accounts to create a coherent narrative of how the kneeling man photograph came to be. We believe it constitutes an advance in the limited scholarship on Haviv’s photography, especially since previous writing consistently misconstrues the image as a “pre-execution photograph,”⁴ as if the people standing next to the kneeling man are about to kill him with the pistols displayed.⁵ Our research is based on the relatively abundant but fragmented documentation available about the image in question, and we believe our article correctly portrays the circumstances surrounding its creation.

In response to Haviv’s specific criticisms: (1) we readily grant that it was Arkan’s men rather than Arkan himself who told Haviv not to take photographs at certain times. We recognize that in a different analysis it might be worthwhile to probe this distinction and, for instance, the extent to which Arkan had not accounted for incriminating photographs being taken; however, we find that it is for our purposes a distinction without a difference. If Arkan was in command of his paramilitary unit (there is no indication to the contrary)⁶ and the Tigers operated according to his wishes, then we are not misrepresenting the situation in our statement, which appears by way of introduction to the analysis of a photograph that was not among those taken in secret. It is a hasty generalization to suggest this discredits the rest of our paper.

(2) Haviv objects to the notion that his camera may have been, as we inquired, “a mirror through which Arkan was able to promote his terrifying images to the world,”⁷ on the grounds that Arkan attempted to take his film before allowing him to leave...