Human Rights Quarterly, 2016
A reply to photojournalist Ron Haviv’s response (HRQ 38(1):208–10) to our article “Bearing Witness and the Limits of War Photojournalism” (HRQ 37(3):629–36). The reply addresses Haviv’s empirical and methodological criticisms and updates the record with newly discovered information about the photograph’s subject—Hajrush Ziberi, an ethnic Albanian from Macedonia whose remains were identified through DNA analysis after being found in the Sava. We use the exchange to restate the aim of the original work: setting aside the photographer’s intentions to better evaluate the unintended and potentially pernicious consequences of photographic practice in contexts of political violence, and to make the case that war photographers are rarely afforded the detached objectivity of forensic photographers but tend to be participants, constitutive of the events they capture.
A reply to Ron Haviv’s response to our original article.
A reply to photojournalist Ron Haviv’s response (HRQ 38(1):208–10) to our article “Bearing Witness and the Limits of War Photojournalism” (HRQ 37(3):629–36). The reply addresses Haviv’s empirical and methodological criticisms and updates the record with newly discovered information about the photograph’s subject—Hajrush Ziberi, an ethnic Albanian from Macedonia whose remains were identified through DNA analysis after being found in the Sava. We use the exchange to restate the aim of the original work: setting aside the photographer’s intentions to better evaluate the unintended and potentially pernicious consequences of photographic practice in contexts of political violence, and to make the case that war photographers are rarely afforded the detached objectivity of forensic photographers but tend to be participants, constitutive of the events they capture.