Ron Haviv

Location
New York, USA

Ron Haviv is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, award-winning photojournalist, and co-founder of VII, and is dedicated to documenting conflict and raising human rights issues around the globe. He is also the co-founder of the non-profit VII Foundation, which concentrates on documentary projects and supporting education in media practice.

His first photography book, Blood and Honey: A Balkan War Journal, was called “One of the best non-fiction books of the year” by The Los Angeles Times and “A chilling but vastly important record of a people’s suffering” by Newsweek. His other monographs are Afghanistan: The Road to Kabul, Haiti: 12 January 2010, The Lost Rolls, and Shadow of Memory.

Haviv has produced an unflinching record of the injustices of war, and his photography has had a singular impact. His work in the Balkans, which spanned over a decade of conflict, was used as evidence to indict and convict war criminals at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. President H.W. George Bush cited Haviv’s chilling photographs documenting paramilitary violence in Panama as one of the reasons for the 1989 American intervention.

His work is in the collections of The Getty, Eastman House, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others, and has been seen in numerous other museums and galleries, including the Louvre, United Nations, Council on Foreign Relations, Fotografiska, and International Center of Photography.

Haviv is the central character in six documentary films, including National Geographic Explorer’s Freelance in a World of Risk, in which he speaks about the dangers of combat photography, including his numerous detentions and close calls. He has provided expert analysis and commentary on ABC World News, BBC, CNN, NPR, MSNBC, NBC Nightly News, New York Times, Washington Post, Good Morning America, and The Charlie Rose Show.  He has written Opinion pieces for the Washington Post and The New York Times and spoken at TEDx and numerous other lectures at universities and conferences.

He is currently co-directing two documentaries, Biography of a Photo and Picasso of Harlem.