vital current and Honey: A Balkan War Journal on Ron Haviv SARA Gallery strange York.

vital current and Honey: A Balkan War Journal

on Ron Haviv

SARA Gallery

strange York, New York

December 7 2000-January 19 2001

National Gallery of Bosnia

Sarejevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

December 13-January 8 2001

house and Honey: A Balkan War Journal

by the agency of Ron Haviv

recently made known York, NY: Umbrage Editions/TV Books

192 pp/$4000 (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 material part of color photographs that juxtapose depictions of a range of human experience and emotion against a once-beautiful further now battered landscape during wartime. Haviv, an American photojournalist, first visited the Balkans in 1991 as Slovenia was declaring its independence, and replyed to Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo several times across the next near-decade. Although Haviv had shielded such loaded international events as the Kurdish flight from Iraq, the fall of the Berlin Wall, famine in Somalia, political upheaval in Haiti, Rwandan refugee and medicine wars in Colombia--winning several World Pres awards, an Overseas Pres form a club award and the Leica Medal of superiority among others, along the way--the atrocities he witnessed in the Balkans region have affected him greatest in quantity 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 upon a train to Lubiana, Slovenia tearfully shared her fears that first Slovenia, then Bosnia, then Croatia, then Kosovo would yield to the civil war, Haviv didn't believe it, thinking that a war breaking disclosed in the middle of Europe was impossible. yet 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 the agency of detractors ran on the conceals of Time, Newsweek and U of the present days & World Report, a photojournalistic feat that had not been achieved since the Vietnam era. on the other hand Haviv does not photograph for hostile encounter value, his images are not those of an outsider looking to sensationalize a situation or barter a picture. He is able to maintain journalistic objectivity as he documents all sides in the conflict, unless 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 satisfied carefully considered, providing both information and an appreciable aesthetic sensibility, although the latter is perhaps more happenstance considering the conditions he works below It is obvious from his work that Haviv is serious about capturing a significance not just an image; a semblance of principle not merely a notion.

The exhibition in the SARA Gallery was cramped, like likewise many in Manhattan galleries, with 55 images winding around a hallway into a small interview room and even behind the gallery's reception desk and images stacked three high forward one wall. The catalog contains several dozen more images not in the show--many of them powerful equal in the smaller, two-dimensional format of the printed page--and the difficult task of curating a gallery exhibit to from this wealth of deserving material must be recognized. pair large wall quotes open the present to view One is from the Koran: "Beware your enemy, if it were not that beware your friend a hundr pen Because if your friend becomes your enemy he can mar you all the more, because he knows the funnel 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 extremely honest, I almost forgot which year this is. We missed any sense of seasons Any sense of future." The passages set the tone for a tale of avenge violence and loss that was played disclosed in the cities, towns and fields of the Balkans, the horror of which lives forward in Haviv's photographs.

The images are essentially untitled, however are accompanied by elaborate captions that explain the situation depicted in each photograph. This decision certainly has a bearing to assign the photographs a more documentary character but the explanations do provide viewers with crucial information that augments the singular power of the images, which can, and do, stand onward their own. The largest photograph, and the united with the greatest emotional impact, was positioned as the first image a visitor beholds although in the order of the numbered pieces, it relentless in the middle. The caption of the life-size photograph explains that a Bosnian family go [i]or[/i] come backed to their suburban Sarajevo abode after the city's reunification to find nothing left in their abode but this violently defaced family portrait. The image is a pos snapshot of a family of four standing forward the bank of a river. The heads of all four have been scratched revealed horizontally and the body of each has been pierced vertically from 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 acknowledge potential misfortune, or conversely for most numerous in the United States, their privilege.