Human Rights Quarterly, 2015
Photojournalist Ron Haviv’s 1992 photograph of a Bosnian Muslim man on his knees, pleading to the camera for his life in Bijeljina, was taken while Haviv was traveling with Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović’s paramilitary Tigers at the outset of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Analyzing the photograph through Harold Garfinkel’s account of status degradation ceremonies, this article argues that Haviv was not a detached observer but a constitutive participant: the violence in Bijeljina took the form of a degradation ceremony in which the photographer—and, through his images, the watching world—played the structurally indispensable role of witness. War photojournalism’s limits emerge from this involvement. The camera does not stand outside the violence it records, even when the resulting images later serve as evidence, as Haviv’s did at the Hague. Taking the photograph seriously as a sociological event rather than a document raises uncomfortable questions about how bearing witness can sustain, and not only indict, ethnic cleansing.
Ron Haviv responded in Human Rights Quarterly 38(1); our reply appeared in the same issue.
Photojournalist Ron Haviv’s 1992 photograph of a Bosnian Muslim man on his knees, pleading to the camera for his life in Bijeljina, was taken while Haviv was traveling with Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović’s paramilitary Tigers at the outset of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Analyzing the photograph through Harold Garfinkel’s account of status degradation ceremonies, this article argues that Haviv was not a detached observer but a constitutive participant: the violence in Bijeljina took the form of a degradation ceremony in which the photographer—and, through his images, the watching world—played the structurally indispensable role of witness. War photojournalism’s limits emerge from this involvement. The camera does not stand outside the violence it records, even when the resulting images later serve as evidence, as Haviv’s did at the Hague. Taking the photograph seriously as a sociological event rather than a document raises uncomfortable questions about how bearing witness can sustain, and not only indict, ethnic cleansing.