MuseumDESCRIPTION:
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will project wall-sized images of the genocide in Darfur onto its facade every night during Thanksgiving week, marking the first time the national memorial’s exterior will be used to highlight contemporary genocide. The photographs are drawn from the work of some of the world’s premier photojournalists, including VoGP guest, Ron Haviv. Ron discusses the challenges he faces as a crisis photographer, what brought him to Darfur and his work in the Balkans.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: During Thanksgiving week, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington is going to project wall-sized images of the escalating crisis in Darfur onto the outside of the building. The photographs are drawn from the work of some of the world’s premier photojournalists, including my guest today, Ron Haviv. Ron has won numerous awards for his work and has produced some of the most important images of conflict and other humanitarian crises in the past fifteen years. He is truly one of the most acclaimed photojournalists at work today. Ron, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us.
RON HAVIV: Thank you for having me.
JERRY FOWLER: Let us first start talking about Darfur. When did you go to Darfur?
RON HAVIV: I spent part of the summer of 2005 in Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: You have been in a lot of conflict areas—most notably the Balkans, but many other places besides that—what were some of the things that struck you about Darfur that were similar to other situations, and what was unique to Darfur?
RON HAVIV: Probably one of the most striking things was the similarities that I saw in Darfur that I have seen in other civil conflicts around the world. It is quite simply the breakdown of combatants by tribe, by differences, by who they are, who you are. Sort of the exploitation of fear and the rhetoric of the government and the militias in Sudan and how they spoke about the others. When conversations like that take place, especially in the beginning, it most often always leads to the violence that we see today in Darfur.
JERRY FOWLER: A number of your pictures are going to be used in this project at the Museum, that is also, I guess, going to be done in several places around the country, but when we asked you for a picture to put on the web site to go along with this interview—which people, by the way, can see by going to the Voices on Genocide Prevention page of the Museum web site—you chose a picture of three girls, which is really quite striking. There is one in the foreground and then two in the background and the one in the foreground is very attractive—looks perhaps like a teenage girl with her eyes downcast—and the caption says that she is leaving an IDP camp to go gather firewood. Why did you choose that photograph in particular?
RON HAVIV: I chose that photograph because of the way that the young girls are holding themselves. There is a certain beauty in the image that comes from within, from the dignity that they are holding themselves, and basically about the journey that they are about to take; the sort of dangerous journey to look for the most basic of necessities, firewood, to help cook the food. When they go on that journey, sometimes it takes up to two days for them to find wood because the areas around the camps have been deforested to such a great degree. They have to put themselves at great risk; they have to cross lines; the girls that I spoke to that day, luckily, had never been raped, but they had avoided being attacked, they had escaped from soldiers and Janjaweed militias at certain times. It is just very indicative of the entire situation in Darfur. The men are not able to go out to look for firewood because they know that if they encounter Janjaweed or government they will definitely be killed. The women do not go out because they are sure that they will be raped, so they send out their young children in the hope that nothing will ever happen to them. Unfortunately, there are more and more reports, and I met several young girls as well in my travels, that did not escape the wrath and were raped and attacked by the different groups.
JERRY FOWLER: One of the things that I noticed in your Darfur photographs that I had not noticed in other photographs that I have seen from you—especially from the former Yugoslavia—is that quite a number of them had the horizon cutting diagonally across the frame. Is that something that you particularly used in Darfur, and if so, why?
RON HAVIV: I think it was something that just seemed appropriate for the environment that I was in, and I think in each different story, you try to photograph it in a way that gives the proper effects to what you are doing, and so that the viewer can feel it in a certain way. I think it adds some urgency, a visual urgency to the image.
JERRY FOWLER: I thought it was interesting actually because one of the light motifs of the architecture of the Holocaust Museum is diagonals, asymmetrical diagonals. It kind of represents things being out of kilter and things not being aligned in the way that they normally are.
RON HAVIV: I think Darfur is actually a perfect example of a place that we are experiencing that today in the world.
JERRY FOWLER: What took you to Darfur? I guess this is kind of a larger question in terms of how you determine where to go. Do you go places and then sell your photographs? Or do you get editors who send you to go to places?
RON HAVIV: It varies from situation to situation. I was trying to get to Darfur for quite a while. It is a difficult place to get a visa; it is a difficult place to push the media—especially the United States media—into paying attention to, and I went to UNICEF and did a proposal with them to do a report for the graphic report on the status of children. One of the things that quite often happens, especially in civil conflicts is that in the beginning people are not really paying attention to what is happening to children, but I went to Darfur, and the conflict had already been going on for two years, and it was a good opportunity to sort of see what was happening with the children in Darfur. One of the reasons that it is important is because children grow up very fast in Darfur, and they quickly go from becoming children to actually becoming participants in the conflict. We can quite see as it is moving on and on, as year after year goes on, this entire generation is getting lost to this war, and that is going to basically guarantee a continuation of the conflict for many more years to come.
JERRY FOWLER: I guess this comes back to the question that I started out with; that effect on children is probably quite common in these situations?
RON HAVIV: It is quite common. These types of conflicts affect the civilians to a great deal; it is not just people running around with guns that are involved, but the civilian population that bears the brunt of it, and of course, the children, being the least protected and the most innocent often are affected the greatest. It is incredibly important for the international community to pay attention to what is happening to the children of Darfur, and it is quite interesting, in all my conversations with the children, I would ask them if they had the opportunity to go to school or if they had the opportunity to pick up a weapon, what would they do? More than half of them were saying that they would pick up a weapon to go back and take revenge for what happened to them and their families. When you hear things like that, you know that the future just is not going to go well.
JERRY FOWLER: Would this be boys and girls or would this be predominantly boys?
RON HAVIV: It was both boys and girls, but there are a number of child soldiers that have been brought into the SLA and the various militia groups on the side of the rebels, and also on the government side there are also very young, young soldiers that are fighting.
JERRY FOWLER: You made reference to the idea that the international community should pay attention to what is happening to children, and of course, one way in which people around the world pay attention to situations like this is through the media. It seems like with Darfur and other crisis situations, at best, you get little blips of coverage and then long periods of non-coverage. From your experience as someone who is almost constantly involved in these situations, what does it take to move editors and move media outlets to actually cover these?
RON HAVIV: It is a very, very difficult process, and often, the process that works the best is media copying one another, so if one respected publication starts paying attention to one particular area or conflict, often other follow; but often no one is paying any attention to conflicts, and that is what happened with Darfur to quite a great degree, and to a large extent the coverage of Darfur and some of the media effect that has taken place is due to, probably Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who is sort of taking it as a personal cause to continuously use his column to raise awareness of Darfur. Given that this conflict has now entered its third year, and I am sure if you look especially in terms of the network news of the amount of time they have devoted to Darfur over those three years, it is incredibly lacking, and it is quite the struggle for myself and my colleagues that are going off to these places, trying to get this work seen through the media, and it is a very difficult thing. I think it is something that we as the public need to understand, that we are not being given news of everything that is happening in the world, and we should demand it because I think that if the networks, the magazine publishers knew—especially the American audience—that they were interested in knowing about what was happening in places like Darfur, they would provide for it.
JERRY FOWLER: I think that is an important point. How responsive is the media to demands from individuals or groups of individuals that a certain story be covered?
RON HAVIV: I think it is difficult on a story by story basis, but I think what is more important is that there needs to be an understanding by those that make the decisions on what is portrayed in the media that the American audience is actually interested in world events, and that would need to create a reeducation of the understanding and relationship between the media and the audience, and I think that we have gone so far over into the extremes of pop culture and things of that nature being more important that when you have topics such as genocide being treated with only a paragraph, a sentence or not at all, it is up to us as the audience to tell them, “Hey, we will buy the magazine, we will watch the television reports, we will read the newspaper. Give it to us,” and then they will be able to convince their advertisers and then the system will work.
JERRY FOWLER: Someone I happened to encounter recently made the point of saying that whenever she sees a Darfur related story on a news web site—whether it is CBS News, CNN or BBC—she always makes a point of clicking through it, just to send a signal to the corporate masters that that is a story that someone cares about.
RON HAVIV: That is great; that is the exact philosophy. Now having the ability to do something as instantaneous as that, using the Internet, I think hopefully, we will start to change the way that the world is covered.
JERRY FOWLER: Of course the flip side is that often times a situation can be very, very well known and still response is lacking, and I know in particular, you published a collection of your photographs from the former Yugoslavia called “Blood and Honey,” which is just a remarkable document, both in terms of the text, but also especially in terms of the images; but one of the points that you made in there is that as you were covering the war in the Balkans and the conflict in the Balkans, you said, “It became difficult to justify my role as a journalist because there was not a response that was coming,” and then you ultimately said that you saw “Blood and Honey” as “an accusation to those who saw yet stood by and did nothing until thousands had died and millions became refugees.” How do you deal with this fact that you can publish these photographs and that they can be very, very compelling, and still there is not much or a response?
RON HAVIV: By the very fact that it took me quite a while to understand but when the work failed in its initial attempt to inform, to educate, to help change the situation on the ground, the photography then entered another world, a world of evidence by creating a collective history. We, as photographers, are ensuring that no one can ever say, “We did not know.” I find that incredibly important because it holds everybody accountable, but when I say everybody, I do not only mean the participants, those with the guns, those giving the orders, but also the politicians around, those in control of the so-called Western world, the people that have the opportunity to send in troops or to have sanctions—economic or diplomatic—to have an effect on the ground. They too are also responsible, but most importantly, by extension, we as citizens of the world, as those who elect those people into power, we are responsible because this is a very interconnected world, it is a very small world, and what happens in the elections in the United States on November 7th or elsewhere around the world will have an effect on the ground in places like Darfur. It took me a while to understand that concept, but the photography plays a very important role in creating this body of evidence, and that is something that basically keeps me going. I always hope to have an initial impact for people to see what is going on in these places and to react, but quite often that does not happen, and that is the reality of the world, but the work will always exist to hold us accountable for the actions that we saw.
JERRY FOWLER: Do you find it difficult to keep doing the work year after year? That is a very powerful justification, but I am speaking more in terms of just the personal cost of having to encounter the kind of suffering that you encounter in these areas and doing it year after year?
RON HAVIV: It is frustrating; there is no question about it, and I think it has definitely taken a personal toll on me, but I have seen some reaction from my work, I have spoken to people that have said that the work has had some impact on their lives. The work from the Balkans was used in The Hague for the War Crimes Tribunal, and that was very valuable and important for me. It is basically that if people like myself give up then there is nobody to take our place who is going to do it. I think it is an important action for journalists to continue to document these things and slowly and surely and step by step together hopefully we can change things.
JERRY FOWLER: When you talk about the personal toll, could you go into that a little bit more?
RON HAVIV: As it would be for anybody, it is difficult to go to these crises; it is difficult to watch people die in front of you. Sometimes you are able to help, sometimes you are not, sometimes all you are doing is taking a photograph that will help somewhere down the line, but to witness it in real life, in real time has an effect and you have to be able to find an ability to be strong through those things, to be able to work, and to be able to get the stories out. Each journalist finds his or her own way of doing that in order to keep going. I think that it really is imperative given that this is not a career choice to make lots of money on; there are no real financial rewards involved; it has to be coming from the understanding and knowledge that you are contributing to the better welfare in someway.
JERRY FOWLER: I guess one thing I just find remarkable is so many of your photographs have such a deep level of empathy and I think, in particular, this photo we started out talking about of the girls, and how hard it must be to maintain that sense of empathy, to not cope with what you are witnessing by becoming hardened and shutting it out and just going through the motions.
RON HAVIV: I think quite simply, for me, I have always thought to myself, “If it winds up that I go to a situation like Darfur, the DR Congo, or something and I am just going through the motions and there is no empathy coming from me, then certainly, there will be no empathy resulting in the photographs, and therefore, nobody will actually connect to the images, and then why was I there and what was the purpose? That would be the time that I would have to give up and do something else, but it is something I am always very conscious of because the last thing that I ever want to do is treat these situations as like going to the office. This is something very serious, it is something where you are dealing with peoples’ lives, and you are trying to represent them in a way that is true to the situation that they are existing in.
JERRY FOWLER: I think a lot of your most compelling images are images of victims, of people who are suffering, but one of the remarkable aspects, especially of your work in the Balkans was that at least for a period of time you had access to perpetrators and you spent some time with one of the most notorious, the so-called Arkan who was head of one of the Serb militias. I think one thing that people have trouble understanding—I have trouble understanding—is what kind of people engage in these atrocities, and what did you find out about Arkan, having spent time with him?
RON HAVIV: I have spent a lot of time with people like Arkan and the paramilitary leader and even some time with the Janjaweed in Sudan, and what is incredibly remarkable is that the rhetoric is all the same and a lot of this is all based on fear of the unknown, fear of the others, and they all continuously bring that up; “The other side is going to kill us so we need to kill them first and these are the reasons why,” and they have it completely legitimized in their mind, and they can be incredibly eloquent in the way that they speak about it, yet when you break it down they are just talking about killing somebody because they are of a different nationality, a different religion, they are from a different country, and that is just quite fascinating because having seen that in Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East, in the Balkans, and in different places, it seems like it is not a trait or a condition just specific to one type of person. It is very much a human condition, and it is something that we all need to be very wary of because it can arrive in any place, at any time given the right conditions.
JERRY FOWLER: Ron Haviv is an award winning photojournalist whose work will be included in a special video installation at the Holocaust Museum, Thanksgiving week, in Washington, D.C. You can find out more about that by going to our web site: www.ushmm.org. Ron, thanks for being with us today.
RON HAVIV: You are welcome; thank you.
