by Alexander Palmieri
Some images have the sort of power that crushes and suffocates. I’m twelve again, huddled in the back of a classroom with my friends watching Budd Dwyer paint a wall with the inside of his head. I’m sixteen, alone at my computer, scrolling horrified through the glib selfies of soldiers at Abu Ghraib. I’m nineteen, seeing a Palestinian child carry what remains of his brother in a blood-soaked backpack. I imagine myself desensitized, unfeeling. Death pervades popular media—I’ve been killing aliens and zombies since I was ten. Yet I can’t stop the bile that rises to my throat, the powerless hands that can only scroll so I see more, consume more, gorge myself on terror and tragedy until I’ve done my penance, futilely scrubbing away at my complicity. I switch off my phone and the world becomes small again: my problems are real, those of the Other are not. Sometimes the images surface again, unbidden, in my mind, as if the world is designed to remind me of what I would rather not have seen, yet could not tear my eyes away from. We are haunted: by the ghosts whose making we have silently witnessed, by the inaction that is our only response, by the endlessly cyclical trauma of human violence that builds our empires, feeds us, raises cities in deserts and crushes them underfoot.
How do we, as a species, cope with the pervasive power of these images, which are lurid and violent yet irresistibly fascinating? History assures me that they are catalysts for change; in Vietnam, they played an indelible role in eroding domestic support for the war, making it a televised debacle very unlike most of our shadowy Cold War-era entanglements. In 1968, John Berger wrote about the effect of the images he was seeing in “Photographs of Agony,” reckoning with the inherent contradictions of their proliferation. Shocking images had become so rapidly commonplace; where once the media was too shy to publish the work of their overseas reporters, now photographs of flattened villages, dismembered corpses, and horrific injuries occupied centerfolds (Berger 279). Rationalization of this cultural shift came in two forms: some argued that it was a natural reaction to a more informed public, who yearned for the ugly truth to be shown in full, while others accused papers of bending the knee to exploitative sensationalism and taking more extreme measures to shock a desensitized readership (Berger 279–280). Berger strikes a middle ground; the truth, he claims, is that images do not truly have the power we once imagined. Nevertheless,
They bring us up short. The most literal adjective that could be applied to them is arresting. We are seized by them. . . . As we look at them, the moment of the other’s suffering engulfs us. We are filled with either despair or indignation. Despair takes on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose. Indignation demands action. We try to emerge from the moment of the photograph back into our lives. As we do so, the contrast is such that the resumption of our lives appears to be a hopelessly inadequate response to what we have just seen (280).
Berger argues that this discontinuity—the brief moment of emotion that overwhelms us before it’s replaced with the suffocation of impotence—is central to the power of violent images. They isolate an instant of total agony, an open wound on the face of the human condition, and amplify its power, allowing it to subsume our understanding. It’s a violence amplified twofold, a contrast that seizes us just as the camera seizes the moment of agony. We are subjected, in reaction, to the impression of action—an accelerated heartbeat, tensed muscles, a rise in adrenaline that demands something be done (Berger 280). Yet, Berger claims, every response is inadequate because every response fails to undo the violence that the camera captures and perpetuates; the photographs are “doubly violent” for reinforcing “the contrast between the photographed moment and all others” (280). The photograph overwhelms us “in order to extort the maximum concern,” though it’s hard to say this is inherent to the form, as Berger suggests, our responses to these stimuli being as diverse as they are.
Why, then, do images of violence sometimes fail to elicit action in those poised to be most affected? Berger’s analysis proposes that the discontinuity provoked by these images renders viewers unable to reckon with the event itself: they can only cope privately with their apparent “moral inadequacy” or “perform[] a kind of penance” to assuage the burning guilt they feel (281). Either way, “the issue . . . is effectively depoliticized. The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody” (281). Berger sees this dynamic as the true reason why such photographs failed for so long to force his generation to confront the atrocities committed by their government in their name and spur them to action. The confrontation of the “double violence” of these images “can mask [this] far . . . more urgent confrontation” and prevent the viewer from engaging in the political context that should be glaringly apparent (281).
Faced with these inadequacies, one wonders if publicizing such images is morally justifiable. The idea of a fundamentally immoral art form, that perverts the suffering of the foreign proleteriat regardless of intent, certainly appeals to the cynic in me; at the very least it renders me blameless in my inaction. Susan Sontag engages with this notion, as well as Berger’s analysis, in her essay “In Plato’s Cave.” Approached through allegory, the camera is as a torch in the hands of a puppeteer, casting shadows of reality to enrapture us, the oblivious prisoners of Plato’s cave. Yet, according to Sontag, we are ever more ensorcelled by their beauty, unable to discern their falsities, since photographs have a unique power: they are acquisitional, where earlier art was merely representational. They seem to be “pieces of [the world],” ownable moments of time and reality that are abstracted, packaged, retouched (Sontag 4). They alienate and reduce their subjects, imposing a narrative with their frame as they quite literally capture the light of what is reflected in their lens. More than that, “[p]hotographs furnish evidence,” serving as “incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened” (5). They become faultless testimony, more “real” than anything else, wielded by authorities in an increasingly surveilled world, imperial in scope and measure — symptoms of a society obsessed with industrialized “consumption” (4).
Photography, imbued with this singular power, democratized by technological advancement, ceases to be an art; to Sontag, it has become a “social rite, a defense against anxiety,” and, critically, “a tool of power” (8). With the camera at hand, even more widespread today then Sontag could possibly have imagined, the layman can take possession of a world in which they feel inadequate, documenting every breath, every experience, every facet of uniqueness so that their personhood is demonstrable in image-form. The lens abstracts everything, distancing the subject and the photographer; for the war journalist, it makes non-intervention into an interventionist act, as if photographing a moment of death undoes it, makes it useful and purposeful. Sontag likens it to sexual voyeurism, as it “tacitly, often explicitly, encourag[es] whatever is going on to keep on happening” (12), yet it never fails to maintain an essential aloofness from its prey. As Sontag puts it, “the camera doesn’t rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate — all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment” (12-13). The violation of its victim is acted out at a distance.
What, then, becomes of this violent, almost pornographic act? The answer lies in the ways in which it is consumed. Contrary to presenting us with the ‘real,’ photos can also anesthetize, make less real, take away the power to transfix. What has been captured is less real, less arresting, every time we see it, becoming a “familiar atrocity exhibition” (Sontag 14) – a collective, social sublimation of what otherwise should be impossible to swallow. It’s for this reason that Thich Quang Duc’s self-immolation is no longer shocking; it’s reduced to a corner of my eighth-grade history textbook, a symbol more than something that actually happened. The image’s context is lost. Sontag viewed this as the limit of a photograph’s power:
The knowledge gained through still photographs will always be some kind of sentimentalism, whether cynical or humanist. It will be a knowledge at bargain prices — a semblance of knowledge, a semblance of wisdom; as the act of taking pictures is a semblance of appropriation, a semblance of rape. […] By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is (24).
I find it difficult, however, to denounce photography entirely, to admit that such a vital tool of our media-driven world—an essential element of the viral information chain that many hope will drive a more progressive, globalized society—is simply a corrupt art, permanently marred by the de-realizing power of some of its most fundamental aspects. Perhaps out of obligation to the online world that raised me, awash in images that I still believe enlightened me in some way to a more complete understanding of myself and my social context, I can’t help but seek out solutions. Teju Cole, a photographer — and therefore much more of an authority on this than I — attempts to reconcile this contradiction in his essay “Object Lesson.” For Cole, images of Ukraine’s 2013 protest movement failed to make a “utilitarian argument” out of a “productive shock.” The photos were so “epic and cinematic” that they induced only “aesthetic satisfaction” and a “jolt of outrage;” they ended up completely stripped of context, making it difficult for the viewer to “remember that they were first and foremost news images, unstaged depictions of real, ongoing human suffering” (Cole). As the “particular politics” behind the images go unexplained, Cole argues, viewers are left unsure about “what to think about it or do in response.”
As Berger commented on the photography of the last generation of war journalism, the images Cole highlights had depoliticized a fundamentally political story, using an art developed over centuries to frame their subject in such a way that they are placed in a vacuum, stripped of all context, unable to inform a meaningful response in a viewer. The continuing failure of the form to act as a vehicle for change and to provide justification for its consumption, across fifty years and dozens of similar conflicts, certainly lends credence to the idea that it is fundamentally flawed. But Cole, too, seeks reform in alternative approaches. He contrasts this emptying effect with the approach of Sergei Ilnitsky, a Ukrainian photographer whose still-life image of a kitchen marred by war represents an altogether different understanding of how to wield the camera’s epistemological power. To Cole, the visible absence of the human body, in a context that almost demands it, imparts immense meaning on the image. As Cole writes:
Domestic objects imply use, and Ilnitsky’s photograph pulls our minds toward the now lost tranquility of the people who owned these items. How many cups of coffee were made in that kitchen? Who bought those tomatoes? Were there children in this household who did their homework on this table? Whose blood is that?
This quiet depiction of the aftermath, then, allows for war photography to exist while evading some of the critiques of possessiveness and exploitation that Sontag and Berger argue. We live in a fundamentally materialistic world where objects carry a great deal of spiritual weight, value, memory, connection (Cole). To see the “things left behind” of another world caninform a healthier connection with the victims of faraway violence, where more overt depictions might fail in their inherent sensationalism and ineffectuality (Cole). We can draw connections between the possessions of others and our own, relating in a more fundamental way to these abandoned “reservoirs . . . of personal experience” (Cole) than we ever could to a corpse, rendered inhuman and unreal by the camera’s lens. The stillness of the subjects of Ilnitsky’s photography may be a semblance of reality, a half-truth of stolen moments, but for Cole they can inspire change in “the core of the sympathetic self” in a way traditional war photography does not.
I find myself, however, without solutions. My generation is being raised in a world of instant transmission. Images, to us, are shortcuts to communication; they are a visual language that draws upon a well of shared Internet experience to convey emotion and complexity where words sometimes fail. This immediacy of images has informed the great social movements of our youth, for better or worse. American youth have become more aware than ever of the failures of their government, of the foreign blood that greases the wheels of imperial domination, and the superprofits that fund our lifestyles. Yet it seems we are no more capable of exerting effective mass power than the last generation of progressives. I feel lost to cynicism, even when my thoughts are reflected in the works of the last generation’s luminaries: Sontag and Berger wrote for different worlds than mine. They could not conceive of the evolution of the social consumption of media, as images of horror and tragedy become mundane through repeated trading on Instagram stories and Twitter threads. They fail to energize me to serious action, largely out of the comforting, pessimistic fear that I can do nothing; yet they are impossible to keep from sharing, desperate as I am in the inadequacy of my response, desperate to prove my awareness and change the minds of others. In Ilnitsky’s photography, Cole saw an alternative to this sort of hopeless consumption, a way in which another approach might inspire change, but I’m not in Gaza, able to choose what I photograph, able to form my own narrative. Action, so far removed from a horror that has become so intimate, feels pointless. Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation created a photograph of finality, the sort of generation-defining event that Berger would have found fascinating. Nothing has come of it. What can I do but trade my horrifying little possessions of guilt, packaged into moments of agony—these ineffective virtue signals that are inexplicably as necessary as oxygen?
Works Cited
Adams, Eddie. “Saigon Execution,” Associated Press, 1 Feb. 1968.
Astor, Maggie. “A Photo That Changed the Course of the Vietnam War.” The New York Times, 1 Feb. 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/02/01/world/asia/vietnam-execution-photo.html.
Berger, John. “Photographs of Agony.” Selected Essays: John Berger, edited by Geoff Dyer, Pantheon Books, 2001, pp. 279-281.
Browne, Malcom. “Thích Quảng Đức Self-Immolation,” Associated Press, 11 June 1963.
Cole, Teju. “Object Lesson.” On Photography, The New York Times Magazine, 22 March 2015, pp. 22-24.
Geoghegan, Tom, et al. “US Airman Dies after Setting Himself on Fire Outside Israeli Embassy in Washington.” BBC, 26 Feb. 2024, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68405119.
Sontag, Susan. “In Plato’s Cave.” On Photography, edited by Susan Sontag, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1973, pp. 3-24.