The 2013 World Press Photo Contest is brimming with the dead and dying in Syria, oil-smeared corpses of soldiers in Sudan and murdered children in Palestine. Our first instinct is to recoil from these pictures, as if they disrespect the victims’ suffering. Some newspapers have expressed anxiety at publishing the more ghastly photos of the Syrian conflict due to fear of backlash from the public. Arielle Emmett, a photojournalist herself, argues that publications that printed photos following the Haitian earthquake were callous and dehumanizing, run by publishers making sensationalist ploys to entice readership through obscenity. Many researchers have claimed being inundated by violent images in the media can numb us to brutality.
No one can deny that images are dangerous and can be misused. It is characteristic of the modern attitude to be suspicious of something meant to elicit an emotional response. Yet we must acknowledge how very easy it is to sit back far away from harm and doubt the motives of those who have risked their lives to capture images of tragedy in Fallujah, Aleppo or Kabul.
I contend that being exposed to news media that depict violence and suffering is essential to being a global citizen. It forces us to confront truths that can contribute to greater empathy and understanding. While it is natural to be suspicious of or turn away from productions of the grotesque, depictions of atrocities jolt us from apathy and inspire reflection. We must look at the pictures of mutilated bodies, smoking wreckage and crying fathers so that we may know the world we live in.
To see bodies in pain is to confront reality and the consequences of human action. Anything less is self-delusion. As Susan Sontag wrote in her book on war photography, “No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance or amnesia.” Humanity isn’t lost when we look at a picture of something awful happening to someone else — it’s lost when we would rather pretend it never happened.
Wherever people feel safe, they will be apathetic to the plights of those far away. How do we combat this indifference? We can only put ourselves in other people’s shoes through observing the dire nature of their situations. Only by making ourselves feel unsafe can we evoke real empathy. Reading about tragedies in far-off lands is simply not enough. Text is bloodless. But images can galvanize. Consider the photography of the Vietnam War and its effect on the antiwar movement or the images of anguish following the Haitian earthquake and the resulting flood of relief donations.
It is nothing short of irresponsible not to educate oneself about the cruelty and agony of the world, and it is nothing short of heartless to prevent oneself from engaging in sympathy for the victims. This is how we should regard images of great violence: not with skepticism or disgust, but with pure, unadulterated sympathy for the victims.
War and disaster imagery is disturbing to be sure, but it needs to be seen to remind us of the consequences of moral and political actions. If true pictures of atrocities are being used as a spectacle to entice viewers it is beside the point. The choice of whether to respect delicate sensibilities or to remind the population of the nature of tragedy is an obvious one — especially in the case of the earthquake in Haiti where individual action could help ameliorate misery. In this era of a million distractions and departures from reality, it is more important than ever to pay attention to actual, corporeal human suffering.
Sontag concluded her book with the statement: “Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing — may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.”
Photographs that appall us also force us to pause and consider and rouse sympathy for an individual on the other side of the world. Many of us will never understand what it means to truly suffer like the individuals in Syria. We will never know what it’s like to be at war, to be dying of sarin exposure or to lose a child. We can only look and imagine. But we must not turn away.
Robyn Sundlee ’16 doesn’t handle violence and gore well at all, but she’s working on it. You can contact her at robyn_sundlee@brown.edu
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