Incidentally, Barnard’s Mandarin could translate closer to “One’s picture’s meaning can express ten thousand words.” Worth, itself so American, had already slipped out of the picture.
A caption does not explain its image, nor interpret it. These are not two currencies—a picture and some verbal change—presented side by side. What a caption provides is context. It situates the picture, often in a place and time, but also as a politics—it teaches us how to read the image, which is mute without it. Literally “with text,” context is the with-ness that clarifies an image’s speech. This is what the light we’ve been given shows us: the space between an image and its speech, between this and that or us and them.
Once the relationships between images, between words, and between people are erased, they become vulnerable to manipulation. Once human beings or historical events become aestheticized as separate, out-of-time concepts—when the September 11 attacks, for example, are reduced to a tragedy that we must never forget, or when the government declares war against a contagious and deadly virus—someone or a group of someones is manipulating sentiment in order to profit, whether by dollar or by death. The costs of this, as we’ve seen in the United States and in Europe—not to mention all the countries vulnerable to American and European politics—have been enormous and will mount exponentially.
If there is a central question in this book, it is this: Who gets to police how we see ourselves and others? How much authority over our expression, as well as our perceptions of those around us, do we surrender to peers, elders, social media, art, entertainment, corporations, and the covers of magazines? If there is a central cost, it is everything: not only literal human lives, as we’ve seen in a deadly yet preventable pandemic as well as the resurgence of strict image-regimes like white nationalism and male chauvinism in mainstream political discourse, but—as a largely unchallenged allegiance to profit over planet continues to destroy our world’s ability to sustain human life—the future of our species.
An ignorance of the ethics and politics of image consumption has brought about a time of such shattering trauma that it’s almost incomprehensible. This trauma is borne of grief: as a culture, as a society, and as individuals across the planet, we have suffered immense personal and collective losses, including the possible loss of the future itself.
But that word, possible, contains a hope. The destruction of our ecosphere is not inevitable, nor is a reductive subservience to harmful ideologies that make a handful of people richer at the expense of all of humanity. These structures are not small, nor easily untangled, but they are easily challenged; and it is the ethical imperative of every single person on earth to challenge them. To thrive, or even survive, we must find a life beyond the fascist imagination—a life where it’s not only possible, but easy to imagine confronting a global disaster, be it a pandemic or something far larger and more gradually insidious, without the temptation to monetize it, entertain oneself with it, surrender to it, or hang one’s personality on its hook.
Everyone has the right to that life. Everyone has the right to resist. In Zvizdal [Chernobyl, so far—so close], a “cinematic play” and documentary about the lives of an elderly couple who farmed in solitude for decades within the Ukraine’s Exclusion Zone, Nadia Lubenoc goes to fetch a bucket of water from a well. Over the years, she’s developed a strong limp, and moves slowly across the field. What happens, her interviewer wants to know, when she can no longer bear the weight? “If you can’t carry a bucket,” she replies, “then carry a cup.”
As long as we live, we are free to narrate an anti-fascist future. Next to nothing, a cup is enough.
I
WHAT A TIME TO CALL THIS ALIVE
The president’s daughter was unhappy. Just after dawn on the fourth of April, 2017, Syrian warplanes launched missiles armed with sarin gas at residential areas in Khan Shaykhun, killing 92 and injuring over 500, including medical personnel and rescue workers. There were no armories, airbases, or rebels in the area: “just people,” according to one doctor. After the attack, reported Syria Direct, many residents “refused to believe their relatives were dead, and are currently holding on to their bodies in the hopes that they will wake up.” Sarin is a nerve agent that brings asphyxiation by paralysis; victims are no longer able to control the muscles that enable them to breathe. In one photograph, boys as young as four or five lie in a tangle of pale, rigid limbs. In another, a young man holds two grey infants in his arms, their cheeks the color of bruises. On Facebook and Twitter, these photographs appeared in between jokes, sponsored ads for fast food and dating apps, and the latest interpretation of whatever it was the president himself had defamed that morning.
Heartbroken, actually, was the word Ivanka Trump had used. “Heartbroken and outraged,” she tweeted, “by the images coming out of Syria following the atrocious chemical attack yesterday.” Her father, until then aloof, decided to launch fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles at the Shayrat airbase, from which the chemical attack was thought to originate. In an interview with The Telegraph, Eric Trump speculated that his sister’s heartbreak held sway over their father’s decision to retaliate: “Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said: ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff.’ My father will act in times like that.” Presumably, she showed her father the images of dead children well after he knew that children had died. In a statement at his Florida mansion, Trump acknowledged that “Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” Newspapers hailed his speech as “presidential.” Even long-term critics of the administration praised his decision, at last, to bomb another country. He had overcome his incompetence and pettiness, they implied, and become a true leader.
The missiles failed to disable the airbase. The following week, in an interview with Fox Business, Trump had forgotten which country he’d attacked. A few days later, he dropped the most powerful weapon any nation has used against another in over seventy years. The target was a small district of Afghanistan, home to ninety-five thousand men, women, and children. That same month, The New York Times reported that eighteen Syrian rebels had been killed in the latest U.S. air strike, which was “the third time in a month that American-led air strikes may have killed civilians or allies.” There were no images of these civilians, of these children, and no word of heartbreak.
These are not new concerns, even in Syria. Nearly a year after the Khan Shaykhun attack, critic Michael Kimmelman observed how The New York Times had published four separate but eerily similar photographs. Each was taken after an air strike in January or February of 2018 in eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Each foregrounds an adult carrying a child, usually bloodied, against a monochrome backdrop of smoke, rubble, and dust. “At one time,” Kimmelman writes, “images of Syria galvanized our attention.” But now, one city looks like another, one neighborhood—even one child—like another. “Photographs of fractured silhouettes of bombed-out buildings blend together. This leveling is Mr. Assad’s triumph.” That each new photograph from Syria looks familiar undercuts their power: “Syrian photographers have produced some remarkable images. But novel photographs in the midst of brutal airstrikes are not easy to make.” Even the novelty of the war selfie, with which many Syrians “have tried to reach out on their own, circulating videos on social media of their pleading children,” has become ubiquitous and, ultimately, overlooked. It’s a similar numbness, a similar leveling, that invites Americans, informed every day or so that the president has committed another unconstitutional or treasonous act, to shrug our shoulders.
By now, one has come to expect images of pain, suffering, shock, and horror in the daily (or hourly) consumption of the news, at home and abroad. Syria itself, like Bosnia, like Palestine, like Flint, like Ferguson, has become an image—a metonym for an ongoing disaster no one seems moved to stop. These are situations that Ariella Azoulay, in The Civil Contract of Photography, calls “on the verge of cata
strophe.” Living conditions in these areas would normally require a state of emergency; this is how fully recognized citizens in wealthy countries respond to such things as “terror attacks.” But in areas of the world—including areas within wealthy countries—that delineate fully recognized citizens from noncitizens or vulnerable citizens, these conditions can be so prolonged and ongoing that there is no recognition of disaster. This creates, Azoulay writes, “a paradoxical situation in which the injury to the population of noncitizens is simultaneously visible and invisible.” There is no event to observe or repair, and no clear demarcation in time anyone can point to that offers a desired normalcy.
Unlike Steve Liss’s photograph of the fence where Matthew Shepard was left to die, there is no single photograph of Syria that claims to speak. There is no photograph of a young girl, her face frozen in horror, as napalm sears the skin from her body. Instead, with its ongoingness, “Syria” evokes not just outrage and heartbreak but resignation: nothing has been done; nothing will be done. In the United States, the next time a video surfaces of our own country’s no-trial, state-sponsored murders, there will be outrage. There will be heartbreak. There may even be riots. But above all there will be resignation: we, as a nation, have already seen hundreds of images like these, and white police officers continue to murder Black citizens with impunity.
That photographs of dead children are horrific but not unfathomable—that one can anticipate and bear their faces in the morning paper or in the glow of some workplace computer screen—is a failure of our civic responsibility toward one another as human beings. This is what Azoulay means by “the civil contract of photography”—an obligation not only to look passively at photographs but to watch them. She riffs on Roland Barthes’s notion of the photograph as a testimony of what “was there” and rebels against the idea that photographs offer moments of time frozen or time stopped: “The verb ‘to watch’ is usually used for regarding phenomena or moving pictures. It entails dimensions of time and movement that need to be reinscribed in the interpretation of the still photographic image.”
Free idea: A series of gifs or short videos that start as still re-creations of famous images depicting suffering, and that come to life and into full color as they continue—the girl in Vietnam screaming as she burns, the soldier in Spain falling to the grass amid gunfire and smoke, and many more.
Human beings do not exist frozen in time but fluid in time; we are time’s contemporaries. Images of people in pain mean there are, or were, people who experienced—and may be out there experiencing as we watch the photograph—such pain. To watch photographs brings them out of the past, where nothing can be done, and into the present, where the past is a map, something to guide us onward. To imagine photographs in motion is not to clip them from our lives and cement them in the past but to include them alongside us, in our own movement toward a shared future. One has to believe we invented silver gelatin, and later celluloid, to bring the past with us, not leave it behind.
Conversely, to look at photographs as documents of what “was there” is to abandon one’s responsibility toward other human beings. It is to sympathize, as Sontag writes, rather than act: “These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward—that is, poor—parts of the world.” In Syria, as these photographs can be made to say, children occasionally asphyxiate from inhaling lethal substances launched by their own governments. In low-income neighborhoods throughout America, as uploaded videos can be made to say, Black Americans are gunned down or strangled, their murderers unpunished.
Perhaps, then, these photographs aren’t being made to say enough? “We mourn when a single whale gets caught in a net and dies,” Kimmelman writes, “but throw up our hands at climate change. The scale of suffering in a place like Ghouta seems almost too big and painful to grasp . . . There’s an argument that coarsened culture requires even more gruesome photographs to rouse our numbed humanity.” It was, after all, the images of “beautiful babies,” presumably, that changed the president’s mind. At least if one overlooks the greater politics of Trump’s and Putin’s respective presidencies, both of which intersect in Syria.
Vladimir Putin is an unashamed and fervent supporter of Assad’s regime and concurrent mass murder. Trump has, repeatedly, boasted of his admiration for Putin despite repeated reports from multiple intelligence agencies that indicate Putin’s interference in U.S. elections and legislative policy, as well as in those of our European allies. In that same Telegraph interview, Eric Trump called his father’s retaliation “proof” that the family is not allied with Putin, even though the counterattack did nothing to disable Assad’s military capabilities. Cynically, I could say that the president’s fifty-nine missiles were nothing but fireworks. They did, after all, earn him that long-sought moniker, presidential, even if only for a few days. He did get to say, “No child of God should ever suffer such horror” in front of the cameras, despite everything he’s done to children and their families since, including separate them, attack them with tear gas, and allow them to suffer abuse and to die from neglect or coronavirus in concentration camps along the southern border.
The image of an American president is one who bombs, mournfully, people who aren’t white, and for a brief moment the image of Trump and the image of an American president coincided, a relief many had been waiting for ever since the anxiety itself—“president-elect Donald Trump”—was created.
But what would children have to look like, in the next photographs? Under what circumstances must we see them suffering in order to say, Something must be done, rather than It’s terrible how things are while we shrug and turn away? What will we demand of a photograph the next time it purports to mean something, to teach us something? As Teju Cole observes, “A photograph cannot show human rights, but it can depict, with terrifying realism, what a starving person looks like, what a human body looks like after it has been shot.” In this syntax, the hope is that terror—or terrifying realism—will do something. This is a faith our culture has long placed in photographs, particularly those of war and of suffering: if we see it, and viscerally, we will no longer tolerate it. It’s a faith placed entirely in aesthetics, in the idea that something can appear so perfectly terrible that we, as viewers, will be overwhelmed and change our lives. Like any aesthetics, there is no finality to this, there is no “enough.” The history of art is a history of metamorphosis, of saying the same thing in new and unfamiliar ways; to focus on the aesthetics of an image, on how it says “children are suffering,” is to search for new ways to delight, however terribly, in such pain.
In 1985, Frances Lindley Fralin assembled The Indelible Image: Photographs of War—1846 to the Present for the Grey Gallery in New York. She hoped, she said, “to make a statement about the absurdity and futility of war.” Even images from the nineteenth century rarely shy away from death, despite their embrace of the mundane. Not only do soldiers gather to exercise or to organize their weapons or to line up in a field; so too do they clean up battlefields, pile corpses, and corral hostages. Reviewing the exhibition for The Village Voice, Gary Indiana noted its sly intention. Despite the obvious—that “war is not only absurd and futile, but sad, lethal, and extremely photogenic”—there is a cumulative anesthetization; the images themselves begin to mean nothing. Instead, like individual words strung together, they form a larger argument, or even a story: “The image of the photographer, snapping away as the world burns, begins to supplant the pictures before one’s eyes . . . On the imaginative level, the generous visceral grossness of ‘The Indelible Image’ melts away, in many instances, into an appreciation of war photography as narrative fiction.” Once the photographer’s gaze becomes visible within one’s own, we read the photograph as we would an authorial construct: so
-and-so saw this, just as I am writing this. The viewer isn’t seeing war for oneself, but being shown another’s vision of war. “In these photographs,” Indiana concludes, “reality has become a fiction, the fiction of objectivity: lower the camera to the floor level, change the lighting, and you’ve got a whole different kind of truth on your hands.”
Photographs don’t speak; they are used as speech. Photographs don’t mean; they are imbued with meaning. “The kinds of details photographs are good at are visual and affective,” Cole writes, “different from the kinds of details we might call ‘political,’ which have to do with laws, fine shades of linguistic meaning and the distribution of power.” To infer meaning from the visual, from the affective, is to place an inordinate trust, or even hope, in photography: if we become afraid enough, moved enough, the photograph will have said, definitively, that suffering exists and must be stopped. It will have told us what to do and how to do it. The hope for any photograph of suffering or atrocity is to show us the last photograph of suffering or atrocity that humankind will ever have to see. Strangely, no such photographs exist. There are no last photographs of suffering or atrocity—only of individual human beings, of creatures, of places. The last photograph of a northern white rhino, the last photograph of the Hetch Hetchy Valley, the last photograph of George Floyd or Matthew Shepard or a toddler in Syria; these subjects existed, but no longer. Meanwhile suffering is immortal, atrocity ever resurrected.
There’s something Christian in the photograph of the fence where Matthew Shepard was found dying, with no small influence from the murder’s apocrypha. Vanity Fair noted that he’d been “crucified,” even though his hands, according to the police report, were tied behind his back. The tear tracks one imagines on his face—visible only, said the officer who untied him, because they’d washed away his blood—imbue his suffering with resignation rather than fear, with sorrow for having lived in such a world rather than anger or panic at having to leave it. There are the facts: he was five two and 105 pounds, blond, boyish, and wore braces. Yet none of these, the facts or the stories, are present in Steve Liss’s photograph itself; there is only the fence, at dawn, embracing the first glow of sun as it looms over the ground, which remains in shadow. The posts themselves, mottled and rough, seem primal and hastily constructed. From one of them, someone has hung a basket of flowers whose petals weep or drip over the side. Even the X of each support post is asymmetrical; they all have the look of leaning crosses, one after another toward the horizon.
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