The Unpower of the Photograph

We are in this modern era confronted with horrifying photographs which, we are told, ought to change everything. A dying toddler with a vulture in the background. A dead child on the beach. An apparently wounded child covered with white dust. The photo is widely distributed, shock is widely felt. Sometimes, even, some minor and temporary policy change seems to occur, and we hope that our society will now act decisively to end some crisis or another.

And then nothing happens, not really, the crisis continues, children continue to die, and so on.

A year or two or ten later we revisit the photo and lengthy think pieces are written about how venal we all are, and why the photograph didn't work this time.

It never works. It never did work. Photographs don't do that. They do not shape society.

We see the horrifying photo, and, as we do with photographs that touch us, we metaphorically enter into the world of the photo. We build that world out in our imagination, from the things we see in the picture, from whatever context we know, from things of ourselves. For a moment, we are in some sense there on the beach. We can hear the lamentations, we viscerally feel the suffering of the refugees. We see their rubber boats and smell the terror, the sorrow, the exaltation of finding land at last after the terrifying night, after the storm, after all the people who did not survive to attempt the deadly crossing, after all the people who did not survive the deadly crossing.

We are there, in that world, we feel it profoundly. This is the power of the photograph. This is what photographs do.

We imagine that we have touched reality. The world in our imagination, built around the photo, feels like reality. We think our construct has revealed truth to us, because it is grounded in whatever truth the photograph holds.

This must change, we think. This is truth, and it is terrible, and therefore...

But it isn't truth, it's a construct. It's a dream.

It might overlap with truth. Hypothetically, we might even have gotten every detail right; our construct might, hypothetically, be a perfect copy of the real world surrounding the photograph. Nevertheless, what we react to is the copy, the construct, rather than the real thing.

The moment we turn away from the picture the dream, the nightmare, begins to fade; our powerful emotional response begins to fade. Still, we can turn back to the photo and re-feel those same sensations, can't we?

We imagine our fury, our grief, our pain to be continuous. After all, every time we check in on it, there it is. We recall the photo, and there is our pain, right next to it. Our reponse is not continuous, though. It fades the moment we cease to attend to it, because it is merely the response to a nightmare.

We do this, of course, with the real world as well. We don't grieve, after all, for the dying parent when we're not thinking about our dying parent. How much moreso, though, do our emotions fade in and out when they are responses to a construct of the imagination! Each of us does this, in roughly the same way, in reaction to the terrible photograph. Quickly, over minutes, hours, days, our response fades. Nobody does anything, in the end. The powerful emotion that felt like it could move mountains was, in all of us, a chimera.

The dying parent remains with us, irrevocably in our world, until the moment they are are not, and then their death remains with us, equally real. We cannot escape these hard realities.

The photograph and its pseudo-reality is a matter of choice. Unless we tack the photo to the wall above our desk, or put it on the fridge with a magnet usually used for lists, the photograph drops out of our view and with it its world and with that the tsunami of emotion that was supposed to change the real world.