That These Photographs Exist

We may understand through narrative, but we remember through photographs. A hundred years from now, when the wars of Yugoslav succession that Ron Haviv’s pictures capture with such terrible precision are no longer the stuff of living memory and other, doubtless equally horrific, events are in the news, what happened in the Balkans in the last decade of the 20th century will be hard to truly assimilate. Can anyone alive today really feel what the retreat of Napoleon’s Grand Army from Moscow was like or imagine the agonies of the native peoples of sub-Saharan Africa as they fought off 19th century Europe’s colonizing mission? And yet, with the invention of photography in the 19th century, and particularly once photojournalism had come into its own in the 1930s, the firewall between past and present began to crumble.

The tragedy of history is not that it repeats itself but that, inevitably, even the most terrible tragedy recedes and finally fades from our collective memory. Today the slaughter of the Jews is real to us, as well it should be; the slaughter of the Albigensians is not. But what memories will survive in 200 years, 500 years, another millennium? It is not just unrealistic but finally inhuman to imagine that our distant descendants will feel about the events of what for them will be the distant past any more passionately than we care about events that occurred in the year 1000.

To insist upon the point is neither to criticize ourselves nor to condemn our posterity. Rather, it is part of the tragic nature of life, just as knowing this is part of the tragic burden of consciousness. What is remarkable about photography is that, though it cannot fundamentally change this underlying reality, it does alter it. The best photojournalists have a unique ability to preserve the reality of the present for those who will be alive at a time when it will have become the past. Whether it is Robert Capa’s photographs from the Spanish Civil War or Henri Cartier-Bresson’s images of the Japanese invasion of China, to name two path-breaking instances, or Haviv’s extraordinary work in the former Yugoslav federation in the 1990s, images capture a truth that otherwise might be lost and communicate in a way that is intelligible not simply to someone already interested in, or at least open to, the subject but to anyone with a heart and a head.

To insist on the point is not to flatter the photojournalist’s enterprise nor to attempt to occlude the form’s real and inescapable limitations. Photographs can evoke, they can illustrate, but they cannot explain--not in depth, anyway--even the pictorial narratives of as gifted an observer as Haviv. Were this possible, a book of photographs like “Blood and Honey” would not need to be buttressed, as all the best ones are, by the accompanying text and photo captions. And yet some images--above all, those of war and humanitarian disaster--do have the capacity to define an event, just as some photographers have the skill, courage, understanding and probably professional good fortune to take the necessary risks needed to capture them.

It is a dangerous enterprise, morally almost as much as physically. For the goal of every good photojournalist is greater than capturing a moment; it is stirring people who could not be on the scene out of their complacency. The best photographs of war and disaster shock and disturb. It doesn’t matter if the image in question depicts the horror as it takes place or, instead, the cold, tear-stained reality of its aftermath. What this book makes clear is Haviv’s ability to operate brilliantly in both registers. He is a superb action photographer, but he is drawn, above all else, to the victims of conflicts: civilians, prisoners, those grieving for lost loved ones.

The sheer adrenaline-laden rush of a battlefield is hard to resist. But unlike so many great photographers--Capa again comes to mind--Haviv does not provide slightest hint of euphoria or sentimentality in his images of soldiers. Even those fighters he might be expected to sympathize with, like the NATO troops who liberated Kosovo in 1999, are treated as men of violence, which, when all is said and done, is what they were. The only truly sympathetic image of a warrior in this book is of a Bosnian soldier leaning against a tree and weeping. He has just learned of the death of a close relative and, in some essential sense, at least at the moment when Haviv recorded the image, he had changed empires, becoming a mourner, not a soldier.

And Haviv seems to struggle to keep any hint of aestheticism out of his photographs. Not for him the chilly, mandarin elegance that marked Cartier-Bresson even at his most journalistic. He is an artist but he is one almost despite himself, as opposed the more readily apprehended way that Sebastia~ o Salgado, one of the greatest photographers and photojournalists of our era to have dealt with war and disaster, is empathetically an artist. A Salgado picture can be appreciated in several ways, and some of his images, searing in their original context, have on other later occasions even been used as illustrations for advertisements, which may have compromised their meaning but did not detract from their quality as images.

But it is almost unimaginable that there could be more than one appropriate interpretation of a Ron Haviv picture. Obviously, I am excluding such grotesque misappropriations as the ads by Benetton that featured the bloody T-shirt of a dead Croatian soldier or the company’s more recent equally disturbing campaign in which photos of death row inmates were used. Haviv’s pictures have not figured in these nihilistic travesties, though I have no doubt that in such a context, even a Haviv image could doubtless be compromised. What gives Haviv’s photographs their exceptional force is how nonplastic they are, and how difficult to misinterpret or appropriate.

Haviv’s most famous photograph, and justifiably so, is almost certainly the picture he took in the eastern Bosnian town Bijeljina in 1992 of a Serb paramilitary kicking a Bosnian woman. For almost every correspondent who covered the Bosnian War, this image sums up what took place there. There, before you, is the face of ethnic cleansing. The photograph is also almost a parable for what took place in Bosnia, which was not war in any traditional sense but slaughter; not the clash of armies but the destruction by soldiers of civilians.

Haviv understood this early and completely, and throughout the course of the fighting, first in Croatia, then in Bosnia and then finally in Kosovo, he never lost sight of what he was witnessing. For that reason, “Blood and Honey” is more than a long-overdue collection of his photographs; it is a compelling retelling of the evil that was done in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999. It would be preposterous to pretend that the Balkans’ evil perpetrates itself or ended there. It is going on, as I write, in Burundi, in Sri Lanka and, for that matter, in Kosovo itself. And it is probably vain to expect that the kind of evil and suffering that Haviv has spent his career chronicling will ever disappear.

This does not make Haviv’s accomplishment either less valuable or less remarkable. It simply means that Haviv himself, or other photographers impelled by the same kind of dedication and honesty, will have to apply the same unsparing lens to the future Bosnias of the world. In the meantime, the fact that these pictures exist at all means that the crimes that were committed in the Balkans can never be wished away and that the efforts of future generations of revisionists to retouch reality will be thwarted, to a very important extent. Ron Haviv risked his life and psychic equilibrium to record this series of photographs. For that 10-year commitment, he is owed a great debt of gratitude, not just by those of us who care about the Balkans, but by all who care about the truth.