Ron Haviv: There needs to be a different reaction to war imagery

Renowned photojournalist talks about care for the subject, going to war and fear.

By Aulonë Kadriu | July 2, 2024

When world-renowned photographer and visual journalist Ron Haviv showed some images from his documentation of the wars in former Yugoslavia at a workshop in Warsaw, Poland, that I attended, I was captivated. I hoped that he might, perhaps, show a picture of me or a family member from 1999 in Kosovo — the year we lost most of our photographs, leaving behind a visual void and many questions. It was a time when many Kosovo Albanians lost their photographs, as the full-scale war was making their homeland a grim image.

As such, photographs taken or burnt often speak to broader abuse, forceful erasure of identity and attack on people’s need to remember. Photography is not only important for remembering, but is particularly powerful when people need to be seen so that their pain, misery and destruction is halted, hopefully, by someone who sees them.

Haviv, a co-founder of VII Photo Agency — which is dedicated to documenting conflict and social injustice around the globe — has photographed many wars and other cases of human suffering by being, as he puts it, “one of the eyes of the public.” His work has taken him around the world, from Democratic Republic of the Congo to Afghanistan, Haiti to Sri Lanka to Los Angeles.

He was there when it all happened in the former Yugoslavia too. He witnessed and photographed some of the ghastliest atrocities this region has seen: the murders of hundreds of civilians in the besieged town of Vukovar in Croatia by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) in 1991; beatings and killings of civilians in Bijeljina, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992; the funeral of a five-week old baby in Drenica, Kosovo who could not survive exposure to the elements as over a million Kosovo Albanians were forced to flee their houses in 1999.

“These were not people that were dying from cancer, or heart attack. These were political deaths and people wanted their story told,” said Haviv, recalling these images. These photographs and many others from those years are in Haviv’s 2000 book “Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal.” The book also contains another widely-known photograph Haviv took: Serbian warlord Željko Ražnatović, or Arkan, proudly holding a tiger as his paramilitary group, known as the Tigers, stands behind him.

In an interview aired in 1992, Arkan called Haviv his “good friend.” This changed quickly after Haviv’s Bijeljina photographs were published. Arkan reportedly said that he looked forward to the day he could drink Haviv’s blood. That day never came. In June 2024, Haviv came to Prishtina for the 25th anniversary of Kosovo’s liberation to lead a lecture organized by the Association of Journalists of Kosovo. K2.0 took the opportunity to talk to him about human emotion, being in the right place at the right time, becoming the eyes of others and the difficult profession of journalism.

K2.0: Do you remember when you decided to come to Kosovo? What informed this step?

Ron Haviv: It was inevitable. I started in Slovenia, then Croatia, then to Bosnia. Each step was relatively expected unless there was some sort of intervention — all the interventions came very late. But Kosovo was always part of the conversation. The world was most afraid that the war would come here. Many people thought that Kosovo would engage other countries more so than Croatia, possibly Bosnia, so it was always “yeah the war is here but hopefully it will never go to Kosovo.” Then of course on the Serbian side, Kosovo is symbolic and historic and they treat it in a different way, so it is spoken about with reverence and history and their interpretation of what happened. So given the conditions that Kosovars were living under it seemed inevitable that I would wind up here. I came, I think, shortly after the Jasharis were killed. And over the course of the next two years, I was dealing with the refugees in Montenegro, Albania, primarily and a little bit in Macedonia.

It was so disappointing to see the same things I had been photographing in Vukovar, in Bosnia, ethnic cleansing, civilian suffering, funerals of civilians.

There was a small group of international journalists working with the Kosovar journalists. The media no longer works like that. Each side needed each other and worked hand-in-hand and it was very important because the Kosovars could not get their stories out internationally and the internationals could not work without the Kosovars. So we had all these amazing relationships. There was a small group that continued to document, inform and kept coming back and obviously this story became more intense. It was so disappointing to see the same things I had been photographing in Vukovar, in Bosnia, ethnic cleansing, civilian suffering, funerals of civilians.

What shapes your decision to go somewhere with your camera? How do you know where to be?

It depends on what’s happening. Often the common theme is some need to shine a light, I know it’s a cliché but it’s a cliché for a reason, to kind of amplify voices that cannot be heard enough, try to have some sort of an impact in a real time way which often fails, completely fails. I have now been doing this for 35 years and I have seen work that in the beginning did nothing and then all of a sudden five years later, ten years later becomes a piece of evidence, used in a war crime tribunal or becomes part of an educational curriculum. I know the work can have an impact so I look for places where I am able to do that. Now obviously there are many many places in the world that need that and I cannot go everywhere. So some of it it’s just places that I am drawn to for whatever reasons. In Kosovo, for example, I had decided pretty much after Vukovar that I was going to see the disintegration of Yugoslavia through to its very end and Kosovo was an obvious place because it was the next place.

I had decided pretty much after Vukovar that I was going to see the disintegration of Yugoslavia through to its very end and Kosovo was an obvious place because it was the next place.

You capture moments of fear and desperation, such as the photograph of a couple in Sarajevo hiding from a Serb sniper or the one of a woman in Kosovo watching a house burn. How do you capture people’s emotions in such a raw way?

I think if you found the couple today — I never found them — and asked them if they remember me being there, they would have no memory of me. In so many situations when I am close, I am intimate, I am the least important person to these people who are trying to survive. They don’t usually see me and that benefits the viewer because you are seeing something as natural as possible. Often they are overcome by emotion, such as the photograph — I think it’s from Drenica — of the woman watching the home burn. I mean, this is probably one of the worst experiences that she has ever had, if not the worst one. Again, I am not an important part of her experience. She is experiencing it and I am trying to document her experience so we can feel as an audience, feel it as honestly as possible.

You photographed a seemingly jolly and proud Arkan holding a tiger with his paramilitary unit behind him. You have also photographed Arkan’s Tigers killing and kicking civilians. How could you do both?

Well, you can look at the tiger picture as a jolly, happy picture, or you can look at it like: This is a psychopath holding up a baby tiger, which is more the way that I interpreted that photograph. The connection between the two photographs is very important. The photograph of the tiger shows why I was able to take the second photograph, because Arkan, who was very smart and spoke multiple languages, also felt that he was smarter than everybody else and could control his image. I was with Alexandra Boulat, co-founder of VII Agency with myself, who was an amazing photographer but also happened to be a beautiful French woman. Arkan was a ladies’ man and we said to him “can we do a portrait of you?” More for her than for me, he said “of course,” and then set this whole thing up and we are about to take this photograph and someone hands him this tiger that was “liberated” from a Croatian zoo.

When I met Arkan again in Bijeljina, he had taken my photograph, made it into a poster and so on. He thought because I took that photograph, for whatever reason, and I never said anything to give him any feeling otherwise, he thought “oh you are on our side so you go off with these guys and you document and I’m sure everything will be fine.”

And after you took the Bijeljina photograph?

He was not happy with me. He put me on a list, a deathlist and I kind of narrowly avoided running into him a few times. Supposedly, according to colleagues from Serbia, they were always a little bit behind me. In fact, there was a photographer who had similar physical characteristics to me who was arrested — they thought that he was me. So I think I was a little bit lucky. Then I eventually did get taken prisoner by the Serbs, but I was taken prisoner in Krajina and then brought into Bosnia. They never made the connection. It was like three or four days and then eventually the U.S. government and the French government negotiated my release. Before they made the connection, I was able to get out. By that point, aside from being upset, he now realized, because the Hague was starting, that I was going to be a witness against his men.

There are two photos of funerals in “Blood and Honey” — one of a five-week-old Kosovo-Albanian baby and one of a child crying in Croatia at his father’s funeral. How did you access such events?

The child crying was very early in the Croatian war. It’s probably one of the first funerals I documented. I remember standing outside the house, very respectfully, while they were preparing the body for burial. One of the relatives came out of the house and physically grabbed me and brought me into the house where the women were mourning over the body and said “photograph this, why are you here, photograph this, tell the world what happened to my son, he was killed because he was Croatian by Serbs.”

Basically and unfortunately, in the dozens and dozens of funerals I documented throughout the disintegration of Yugoslavia, it was always like that, because these were not people that were dying from cancer or heart attack. These were political deaths and people wanted their story told, to acknowledge the sacrifice by their mother, sister, brother, father.

With that photograph of the child crying, it was again, unimportant that I am even there. Nobody is acting for the camera, that is pure emotion, no one is paying attention to me. I didn’t feel in any way that I was exploiting them, or coming into something that was very private without permission or hiding under a tree — this was done with the acknowledgement of the process.

People understand the power of the image.

People understand the power of the image. [About the photograph] of the five-week-old who died of exposure in Drenica, it was an incredible representation of the brutality of what was going on in Kosovo. People understood that. I think it is a very gentle photograph. It was the grandmother and somebody else but also a very incredibly brutal photograph of a child who should be in their twenties right now.

You would see statistics, numbers that people cannot really comprehend, but you see one photograph of a baby who died because it was too cold. The number, the statistic becomes reality and then the viewer looks at it in a different way.

You mention care and not exploiting someone’s story. How much pain can you photograph without actually exploiting it?

I think a lot of it is self-determination on what you think is the way to treat them with dignity. It is something that everybody has to determine on their own to a degree but I think there are also some levels and layers of places you don’t cross. Each situation can be different. But at the same time, I think that most of the time, if not always, people understand the role of their photograph. If you are there and something is happening and you are not documenting it, why are you there? I take my responsibility as being one of the eyes of the public very seriously, so I try not to self-edit in the field. I try to use the aesthetics of photography to present images that will create an emotional relationship between the viewer and the image. It’s always a balancing act.

You become the eyes through which the rest of us see what is happening. Whose eyes do you seek to become? What do you expect them to do after seeing?

Those are two excellent questions that don’t have simple answers for. Part of the eyes is that if I am working with a publication, actually specifically for their audience, but the work lives beyond that publication. So I think that is often the way that I think about it. Probably people, to some degree that have the same sort of values that I do, about life and sanctity and so on. There is also the idea of trying — if I feel that something is occurring that is wrong and I know that there are people who support it — that I am giving them the opportunity to learn and maybe that will change their mind. In terms of what you do with the information that you see it really varies.

I mean look, today, certainly in the U.S. and also to some degree around the world, at the protests that are going on in relation to the Israel-Hamas war. A lot of that is coming from the imagery Palestinian journalists are providing. I think that again shows how imagery can play a role. There’s been divestments, conversations, understanding, and there’s also been complete misunderstandings, propaganda and antisemitism and Islamophobia so all these different things are connected and imagery plays a role in all that.

So I think that, to take a step back and give you a simple answer, you want the work to play a role in communication. Photography is not going to stop wars, but it is very important in this understanding, the ability for people to understand, to take knowledge. This is more of a media literacy conversation, but people will look at work in combination with other work, and read and so on, become better informed citizenry to then make their decisions on their own. That’s the ultimate goal, and those people can be politicians, or they can be voters, they can be teenagers, or they can be elderly. Across the board, we have this ability to impact people with work. But it is not a stand-alone and it will never succeed as a stand-alone. Photography, including some of the photographs we talked about, can have great power, but at the same time, without anybody sort of taking it to the next level, it’s not going to do anything.

You have witnessed some dark moments of humanity, and have chronicled people’s deepest suffering. What does that do to you as a person?

It’s again kind of a cliché but we are all made up of our own experiences and that’s who we are today, that’s who you are, that’s who I am. I have no idea what I would be like if I hadn’t gone through these various different things. They are part of me. I don’t think it’s made me more cynical than I was when I started. I think I’ve always been a bit cynical.

I realize the fragility of life is probably one thing that comes across and also one of the things I have learned about human beings — and this has been very important for me in my work — is that the emotion of fear is a primary motivator for almost everything that I have seen, so “we are going to kill you before you come and kill my family,” “I’m afraid you are going to kill my family and whether it is justified or not I am going to do this.” What people will do when they are scared and they want to survive, both in terms of the negative and in terms of the positive, is remarkable. So I think for myself I have learned more about humanity and more about myself because of everything that I have witnessed.

Today, there are increased opportunities for manipulating visual content. There is all the frenzy about AI. Where do you stand on all this?

Photography as a whole will deal with AI, but specifically documentary photojournalism is in an incredibly dangerous place. But we’ve also been in a dangerous place for quite a while. A number of photographers have crossed that line, most of them, if not all, have been caught manipulating photographs, changing things and I think that is very important.

We are going to be in a very dangerous place where it is quite possible, whether through video or photography, that some imagery will come out that will cause a country to go to war.

The relationship between the photographer, the photograph and the viewer is sacrosanct and that’s broken and it’s broken only by the viewers saying “I don’t believe this photograph,” which is already happening. Aside from AI, in the last 8-12 years this idea of “fake news” is very important. It can be that nothing is manipulated and people still don’t believe it because it is not a photograph or a news piece that works within their political opinion… We can’t lose any more of the relationship. Because of this, because of these phones, because of the computers, everybody understands now so easily how you can manipulate a photograph, to do whatever you want. We are going to be in a very dangerous place where it is quite possible, whether through video or photography, that some imagery will come out that will cause a country to go to war. And it won’t be real.

So, again coming and going back to the viewer, the viewer is responsible for where they get their news, where they look at the imagery. One of the things you have to pay attention to is: is it the New York Times or the BBC, or is it the BBA, which looks like the BBC? This is really key. Because once the relationship is broken, we can continue to go out there and document and tell these stories of these people, but if people don’t believe it, it’s a problem.

There are now over one trillion photographs taken a year, a different context that the one you photographed in 1991-1999. What does this mass production of photographs do to people? Do you see a risk of desensitization?

I think there has always been a risk of desensitization. I’m not sure it’s completely based on the numbers, although maybe multiple channels can contribute to that a little bit more than it used to. But, again I have to go back to the responsibility of the viewer. Let’s use Syria, for example. 12 years. For the first couple of years, Aleppo is burning, people are shocked, as they should be and then it becomes a normal thing. Ukraine also, after two years, “Ok, Ukraine, another village is burning, I’ve seen this already and so on…” That’s not supposed to be the right human response. It should be: “Why is Ukraine still happening? Why does Syria go on for 12 years and if Gaza keeps going another year, why haven’t they still figured it out? Why am I still seeing photographs?” So there needs to be a slightly different reaction.

Some of the work, the better work most likely, will rise to the top and become representative of the crisis. So, using Gaza for instance, the photograph taken by Mohammed Salem of the woman holding the body in a white cloth is a powerful image that people hopefully will remember and that will give respect to the other images. That will be the image people will remember, that will represent loss in Gaza. I would never ask anybody, everyday that they have to log on, “Look at this war, look at that war…,” it’s too much. But people do have to pay attention a little bit, because whether you are Kosovar, American, Egyptian, we are connected. There are connections.

You’ve been in very dangerous places. How do you balance personal safety and what needs to be shown?

My answer is pretty simple. I’m not willing, and I don’t want to die for a photograph. I have a line that I hopefully won’t cross, because I want to be able to be there to take the next photograph. There are other people who say “No, I would do everything for a photograph.” So, it’s each person’s own belief. But there has to be a balance.

Talking about fear, for sure I’m afraid when I’m going to a conflict. I try to use fear as a guide for trying to be smart. It’s often a matter of millimeters whether you live or die; you turn this way and it misses you, you turn that way and it hits you. So, there is some sort of fatalistic part of it. Starting with Sarajevo, because so many journalists were being wounded and killed because we had no idea what we were doing. People would be in Vienna in the morning and having coffee and by the evening they would be on the frontline. The next day they’d be dead, because they have never been to war before.

Now, there is a real concerted effort not only for staff of TV and publications and so on, but for freelancers to be trained by former soldiers on how to survive in a war zone. In Ukraine, for instance, the New York Times will have a translator, will have a photographer, will have a writer and will have a security person with them at all times. It is totally a different way of working, compared to five years ago. The security person is not armed, but they are there to say: “This looks dangerous, we are not going to do this.” Or, “I just got a message from another guy, they are going to start attacking here, so we are going to wait” or whatever. So, the idea of safety even within an active warzone is a very big deal.

One of the things that is important to recognize is that we, the international journalists, as opposed to the local Ukrainian journalists, especially the men, can leave Ukraine whenever we want. The Ukrainians can’t. The Gazans are slowly getting out but it is very difficult and very expensive. This is a big difference between coming in as a complete observer, not connected to the place and having this freedom which I have always had, or financial freedom. Money offers you all sorts of benefits that people don’t have.

You’ve met the people you photographed in the past. Is there a story you could share about what they told you?

When Srebrenica fell, Serbs bussed many of the women and children to the lines and they came into Tuzla and went to the UN base. They were suffering from post-traumatic stress and had no idea what happened to their men. I took a photograph of a woman [Nedžiba Salihović] imploring this Swedish UN soldier for some sort of help and he just walks past her and her arms are outstretched. The picture became rather well-known. And I didn’t find her.

Then, I had an exhibition in Sarajevo, we found her and we invited her to come. She also greeted me with her arm stretched, kind of a symbol. She had lost her husband and her son. And then, I met her again when I went back to Srebrenica for the verdict on Mladić and a number of the mothers of Srebrenica were all lined up, including her. She held in one hand the photograph and when they announced that he is guilty, she did the same thing again, which is kind of her trademark, but it was very honest and heartfelt. I have seen her in very important moments of her life and went back with her to her home and met other family and so on. It was representative of many experiences that we had.

The photograph I think is the most representative of all the conflicts here, because there was this idea of erasing the identity of the other.

One other, also from Bosnia, is a photograph of a photograph. It’s a family portrait that was in the suburb called Ilidža of Sarajevo and when Sarajevo was split and Ilidža became Serb-held. The family fled and when they went back to the house, house was completely empty, stripped of everything, no furniture, no windows, nothing, except for this family portrait sitting on the floor in the living room and whether it was the people that lived there… but somebody scratched out their faces with a razor blade. The photograph I think is the most representative of all the conflicts here, because there was this idea of erasing the identity of the other. That was continuously happening.

What are you focusing on with the foundation right now? What else are you working on?

The foundation has a dual mandate. One is to produce projects like “Imagine,” long form projects on important subjects that institutional media can’t handle. We do it in a multi-platform way where there is photography, exhibitions, films, but more importantly also education curriculum for us to get into schools and have some sort of impact, educationally, in which we have been very successful.

The other part is a mandate to teach visual journalism to underrepresented communities around the world. This idea, which is certainly not ours, holds that democracy and free press are intertwined but in order to have a free press, there needs to be, especially in terms of visual journalism, education on how to do this correctly. Again, because of technology, everybody today is a photographer, which is great, but being a documentary photojournalist, visual filmmaker is more than just the imagery. It’s the thought process, it’s the ideas behind it and understanding how to do it correctly. So much of what we talked about today in terms of how you deal with your subjects, in terms of the veracity of the imagery as well as the text that goes along with it, is incredibly important.

These are some of the things that we teach at the foundation. We have a campus in Sarajevo and we have one in France. By next year, we are going to have a program at the University of Sarajevo in the political science department, offering a master’s program between political science and visual journalism. We are around the world but without question, we have a big focus on the Balkans, because that’s where Gary (Knight) and I met, as did many other photographers. So, it is very important for us to ensure that journalism from this area is done properly because we feel like, ourselves, our colleagues whether local or international, sacrificed their lives in order for this to happen. I want to make sure this is done correctly and make sure that it can be done in a way that will have a proper impact.

Feature Image: Majlinda Hoxha / K2.0

This article has been edited for length and clarity. The conversation was conducted in English.

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