More Sour Than Sweet. - Review - book review

Afterimage, Jan, 2001 by Karen Vanmeenen

Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal

By Ron Haviv

SARA Gallery

New York, New York

December 7, 2000-January 19, 2001

National Gallery of Bosnia

Sarejevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

December 13-January 8, 2001

Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal

by Ron Haviv

New York, NY: Umbrage Editions/TV Books

192 pp./$40.00 (hb)

"The Turkish word "Balkan" breaks down into "bal," meaning "blood," and "kan" meaning "honey." Ron Haviv has chosen an appropriate metaphor in his titling of this difficult body of color photographs that juxtapose depictions of a range of human experience and emotion against a once-beautiful but now battered landscape during wartime. Haviv, an American photojournalist, first visited the Balkans in 1991 as Slovenia was declaring its independence, and returned to Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo several times over the next near-decade. Although Haviv had covered such loaded international events as the Kurdish flight from Iraq, the fall of the Berlin Wall, famine in Somalia, political upheaval in Haiti, Rwandan refugees and drug wars in Colombia--winning several World Press awards, an Overseas Press Club award and the Leica Medal of Excellence, among others, along the way--the atrocities he witnessed in the Balkans region have affected him most deeply. As he says in "Ten Years Later," the after word of the eponymous c atalog that accompanies the exhibition, he was naive when he first arrived in the Balkans. When a woman on a train to Lubiana, Slovenia tearfully shared her fears that first Slovenia, then Bosnia, then Croatia, then Kosovo, would succumb to the civil war, Haviv didn't believe it, thinking that a war breaking out in the middle of Europe was impossible. But the woman's premonitions came to pass, and Haviv became determined to document it.

Haviv is undoubtedly a talented journalist: his photograph of the beating of the Vice President of Panama by detractors ran on the covers of Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, a photojournalistic feat that had not been achieved since the Vietnam era. But Haviv does not photograph for shock value, his images are not those of an outsider looking to sensationalize a situation or sell a picture. He is able to maintain journalistic objectivity as he documents all sides in the conflict, but his distate for the human suffering he witnesses is obvious.

Haviv is also a photographic artist and a master of composition. His images are expertly framed and the content carefully considered, providing both information and an appreciable aesthetic sensibility, although the latter is perhaps more happenstance considering the conditions he works under. It is obvious from his work that Haviv is serious about capturing a moment, not just an image; a semblance of truth, not merely a notion.

The exhibition in the SARA Gallery was cramped, like so many in Manhattan galleries, with 55 images winding around a hallway into a small conference room and even behind the gallery's reception desk, and images stacked three high on one wall. The catalog contains several dozen more images not in the show--many of them powerful even in the smaller, two-dimensional format of the printed page--and the difficult task of curating a gallery show from this wealth of deserving material must be recognized. Two large wall quotes open the show. One is from the Koran: "Beware your enemy, but beware your friend a hundred fold. Because if your friend becomes your enemy he can hurt you all the more, because he knows the tunnel to your heart." The other is the words of a resident of Sarajevo: "Every day I am asking ten times a day, which day is it today? Because I can't remember which day of the week it is and the month it is. To be very honest, I almost forgot which year this is. We lost any sense of seasons ... Any sense of future." The texts set the tone for a tale of revenge, violence and loss that was played out in the cities, towns and fields of the Balkans, the horror of which lives on in Haviv's photographs.

The images are essentially untitled, but are accompanied by elaborate captions that explain the situation depicted in each photograph. This decision certainly has a tendency to assign the photographs a more documentary role, but the explanations do provide viewers with crucial information that augments the singular power of the images, which can, and do, stand on their own. The largest photograph, and the one with the greatest emotional impact, was positioned as the first image a visitor sees, although in the order of the numbered pieces, it fell in the middle. The caption of the life-size photograph explains that a Bosnian family returned to their suburban Sarajevo home after the city's reunification to find nothing left in their home but this violently defaced family portrait. The image is a posed snapshot of a family of four standing on the bank of a river. The heads of all four have been scratched out horizontally and the body of each has been pierced vertically by what Haviv believes to be a drill bit. Especially effective was Haviv's decision to enlarge the original altered image to life size, rather than photograph the snapshot in its original surrounding, forcing viewers to assimilate the details of this family's tragedy with their own potential misfortune, or conversely for most in the United States, their privilege.