Haviv Response

One photograph that I found really interesting from Ron Haviv’s Blood and Honey shows a Serbian soldier riding by Haviv on a bike. He looks directly into the lens and gives Haviv what looks like a peace sign, as a building is burning behind him. A rifle almost as tall as he is is attached to his waist. The caption for this photo reads, “A Serbian soldier cycles past a burning house on the destroyed streets of the Croatian city of Vukovar. Nov 14 1991. The city was completely destroyed after three months of bombing by Serbian forces.” This photograph is so memorable and so haunting to me because of its irony. What does this soldier, who presumably just participated in destroying an entire city, know about peace? I thought that maybe this believed his army’s actions would bring on peace, or that maybe it was a mindless gesture, an acknowledgement that he was being photographed. This irony (for lack of a better term)  is something that I noticed in some of the other photos in Blood and Honey. For example, there is the photograph of the couple kissing in front of a ruined church, another of a circus poster laying on a destroyed Bosnian street. The irony in many of these photos becomes extremely sinister given the context of the world they are taken in.

However, as I was thinking about this photo, I decided to look up if the peace sign has the same connotation in Serbian culture as in American culture. Looking closer at the photo, I saw that the soldiers thumb was up and I realized that the soldier in the photo is not giving a peace sign at all, but actually the Serbian three-finger salute. The salute has a controversial history. Originally used to represent the Trinity in Orthodox ceremonies, since then has become a symbol of Serbian nationalism. It was even used by the pro-Nazi government during the Second World War. During the Yugoslav wars, and was used a symbol of victory by the Serbian troops. Knowing this information changed the context of the photograph for me. The “peace sign” no longer seemed ironic. The soldier does not want to evoke peace, but the exact opposite – military power.

I think it’s interesting to think about the way I approached this photo within the context of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others. The book essentially argues that photographs can make us feel, but they can not explain things. About another one of Ron Haviv’s photos in Blood and Honey where a Serbian soldier casually kicks the head of a dead Bosnian, Sontag argues against the idea that the photograph can tell a person all they need to know. My misreading of this photograph was completely because of the country I grew up in. Im sure anyone living in former Yugoslav countries, especially those who were alive during the wars would immediately recognize what the soldier’s hand gesture means and what it is meant to convey. However, if I wasn’t curious enough to research this photo further, I would never have actually understood this photograph. I would have dismissed it as something ironic. Perhaps this is something Haviv thought about when publishing this photograph. I’m sure Haviv would have known that to an American audience, the three finger salute would have, on first glance would be read as a peace sign. His caption mentions nothing about the salute, so I wonder if he wanted to play on this lack of cultural context.