Don't Flinch - The weight of taking a photo

We drown in images, our rivers burst their banks and overflow with visual content. Yet just as three days without water would make the memories of past abundance meaningless, if you remove our ability to capture light we will find ourselves desperately seeking new images, unable to sustain ourselves on past supplies.

It is not for want of past beauty captured or ideas enacted, rather it is because there is always something new approaching, a sunrise that's just right, a retelling of an old love story on new film, a moment of humanity we need top pause on and share. We find so much in this ability to capture moments that it almost seems instinctual, despite the walls of technology and time between the evolution of those instincts and invention of the ability to act upon them.

Going beyond this instinctual urge though, photography holds a genuinely important role to play in our society. We are frequently reminded of the power of images, despite the sheer volume we have of them. the importance of their impact is bought to the fore time and time again.

They humanise, summarise, paradoxically condense and expand upon issues. They document, bare witness and hold those captured accountable for just a moment, and sometimes that moment is all that is needed to galvanise change.

"The Vulture" is one such image that paused peoples worlds for a day. A famine stricken Sudanese child, on hands and knees, being stalked by a vulture. The image did so much to capture the gravity of the situation, made it so real to so many, that it is credited with significantly increasing both aid to, and awareness of, the famine.

It wouldn't exist without someone choosing to bare witness, to not flinch away, both in terms of taking the photo and its publication, nor would any other medium have done justice to that moment in time. A painting, a collage, a generative image showing the same scene would be gauche, over the top and maybe even feel emotionally manipulative. But a photo, a document of what occurred, there is something so undeniable about it that it bypasses the ways we might sidestep the pain it brings if found in more fictious or less grounded mediums.

Now I know there is discussion to be had on the ethics of photos like this, and whilst that isn't what I'm here to focus on today, i do think this quote from Susan Sontag very poignantly sums up the best way of interacting with these images; "There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it ... or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be."

I think this philosophy works so well because it is not saying "You shouldn't look at this image" or that "you should feel bad for sharing this" It is saying if you arent looking at these images and learning from them, or taking action because of them, then you are just engaging in emotional voyeurism. Which i think is a fair comment, because we should be looking to learn from the story's these images tell or take action in those stories, not just engage with them as a form of mental self flagellation or performative morality.

Of course all this is uncomfortable, and because of that discomfort people also have a tendency to attack the photographer in these situations, we may all know the phrase "dont shoot the messenger" but we're quite bad at following through with it. Theres a line of thinking that photographers are simply profiting from misery and pain, but this ignores the fact that to witness this pain first hand, to stand surrounded by gunfire and dead civilians is no small burden.

So it is worth remembering that Kevin Carter killed himself 4 months after taking that Pulitzer prize wining photo of a starving child. Amongst his friends and contemporaries in "the bang bang club" of conflict photographers, a further two would be shot with one, Ken Oosterbroek, being killed, and later in life a third would lose both legs to a landmine.

Desmond Tutu would write about Carter that "We know a little about the cost of being traumatized that drove some to suicide, that, yes, these people were human beings operating under the most demanding of conditions."