SPRING 2007 WINNING ESSAY

Tatyana Liskovich '08

Winner of 2007 Phillips Essay Award

Ethics of Seeing:

The Power of Photographs to Arouse, Provoke and Condemn

“In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe.

They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” 1

Susan Sontag

It can't hurt to look

My freshman year in college I took a class called the “Politics of Starvation” with Professor Lee Witters. I remember some of the lectures and I still have my notes, but what really burned into my mind were the images that augmented the bullet points and sometimes were seemingly detached from any take-away-lessons. There was nothing to write down during the slideshows while we were shown pictures of late-stage marasmus, rail-thin adults and children with rib cages like fossils; other days, we gasped at people bloated with kwashiorkor, swollen bellies that were ironically “full” given their chronic emptiness.

How trite it is to even state the obvious: starvation is gruesome. I was alternatively angered and depressed that I had to sit there and look at what was evocatively disturbing---long after I thought I understood the point. Did these people know that their photographs were being taken? That they would be presented in class as examples of inequality? Who took these photographs? Were they aid workers? “Mere” tourists? Why were these pictures taken? Did I owe their hollow-eyed subjects my rapt attention? Or were they entitled privacy and dignity in their suffering? Should I turn away?

I would leave the class frustrated and bitter. Heading to dinner, I would eat several helpings of what tasted like guilt. I remember that at the end of the term, Professor Witters told us that having seen these photos now obligated us to action. We should use our educations to enact change, do good….help. Only those who have the power and will to intervene have the right to view images of such atrocious human suffering otherwise, here he shook his head reproachfully, we were all just voyeurs. I felt tricked out of ignorance; it seemed that the price of bearing witness to human suffering seemed to be too high, too demanding.

I walked away from the class shaken. I attended some “Students Fighting Hunger” events. I volunteered once at the Haven food shelf in White River Junction. Two years later, I still feel like a Peeping Tom.

Shot seen around the world

I am neither the first nor last to struggle with the concepts of responsibility, obligation and intervention as bred by photographs. Though I was too young to follow the news in 1993, the headlining story of Kevin Carter and his Pulitzer winning photograph is one that encompasses out all of these issues and has become one of the iconic images of my generation.

During the 1990's, a combination of drought, civil war, and general poverty made the famine in Sudan a systematic killer. Carter, a South African photojournalist, had traveled to Sudan with the intent of journaling the rebel movement, but was instead struck by the devastation of the famine and began to photograph the victims of starvation. While traveling near a village in Southern Sudan , the sounds of whimpering brought him to face an emaciated toddler trying to crawl to a feeding center not a hundred yards away. Her path was being calculatingly followed by a vulture, which was strikingly well-nourished in contrast to the hunched figure in the foreground. The picture is haunting, almost surreal in its barren landscape. The vulture is unblinking in its gaze on the child, the girl's eyes are unseen, focused on the ground, and the viewer is torn between one and the other and the implied relationship between the ground, the vulture, the child and themselves. It is a difficult picture to ignore and as the cliché is appropriate, a picture that it is impossible to forget. 2

After taking the photograph, Carter chased the vulture away and sat under a tree and sobbed. Neither he nor anyone else knew what happened to the child.

  3

That year, he sold the photograph to the New York Times which received an outpouring of questions about the child and criticisms of the photographer, who had not helped the child or intervened in her fate. Surrounded by other countless examples of hopelessness, Carter was, in the eye of the public, responsible only for this one.

The Vulture

People across the country condemned Carter for not doing something to save the girl “Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the picture of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, or a Bengali guerrilla in the act of bayoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situation where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.” 4    Critics claimed that because he saw himself as a photographer, Carter allowed himself to escape through the loophole of journalistic authenticity in order to avoid the blame of allowing the girl to die, "the man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering, might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." 5

If there is a victim, the child, then we assume that there must also be a perpetrator. Though it is easy to target Carter as the real evil behind the lens, there are several issues to consider including the context of the environment, the dangers of intervention, and the intention of the photographer. Carter had been traveling in Sudan through war ravaged terrain for several weeks now. He was regularly coming into contact with some of the world's most dire situations. Every day he would see people on the verge of death, at different points in the slow process of starving. This specific photograph that elicited shock from a removed public was only a slice of the horrors that saturated his every day. Simply in order to continue to function, Carter was forced to desensitize himself from his environment to a certain extent; he had to convince himself to see statistics. He was painfully aware of the fact that he could not help everyone or anyone permanently and that his role in the country was that of a witness. Short of giving people his own supply of food, Carter's mission was not as an auxiliary red-cross volunteer. Though of course aid workers are vital to the survival of the Sudanese victims at the most individual level, Carter was trying to spark change by targeting those with the most power to intervene, American citizens and politicians. The argument that his work was less important because it did not immediately help the girl is a product of our inability to consider long-term change and affects. At the time, journalists were also regularly instructed to not touch famine victims because of the danger of spreading and contracting disease from weakened immune systems. Carter could perhaps help only at a danger to himself, against the advice of experts in the vicinity, and perhaps at the risk of his mission of saving himself to be a capable voice for the region. If journalists were expected to intervene in all cases of flood, famine, or other natural disasters, then we would have no more journalists. We would have a handful of additional aid workers at the expense of the activism of the million individual donors who help to support this work once their ignorance is broken through by pictures like those from the New York Times.

Had Carter intended this picture for a private collection or as a token of his travels in Sudan , this would have raised the issue of his perversity, inhumanity, and disrespect. In some ways, our right to photograph something depends on what we are going to do with that image. To say that Carter did not “act” is to dismiss his subsequent activism on the subject of aid to Sudan . Carter used the photograph in the most public way in order to raise awareness and probably did more to “help,” however indirectly, than almost any other single individual. Had he lost focus on his goal of photographing what he saw, he might have stayed in Sudan and never pursued the opportunity to expose what was happening in Sudan . His intervention was through this photograph, which justified his role in the scene because it caused the audience reaction of direct aid, interest and outrage. Even if this somehow had not been the case, Carter's intentions in taking the photograph, his work to bring about activism and awareness, demonstrated that he was not simply an opportunistic vulture waiting to snap up his meal ticket. He was eye-witness who could perhaps do nothing to stop the violence, but would one day testify and see justice done.

Picture this

   Photographs are extremely powerful mediums of expression that have a different place in our society than either drawings or paintings. As Susan Sontag explains in her book, On Photography , photographs are considered more than just reflections of the world, but are credited with an often unqualified trust of being true, a sense of scientific veracity. While other forms of art are somewhat suspect as subjective interpretations of reality, photographs, by contrast, are understood to be accurate visual translations of what took place in front of the camera's eye. They are pieces of an existing reality, captured and forever trapped in the amber of a single frame. The seemingly transparent delivery process of delivering images through the camera leads to people's implicit belief in photographs.

The very act of labeling something as an “event” happens before any photograph is actually taken. Social convention and culture often determines what we think is appropriate material to photograph. Weddings, birthdays, reunions, and vacations have all become synonymous with taking photographs. These images exist as souvenirs from the journey, proof of the occurrence, and mementos of the nostalgia one experiences for the past. These types of photographs are often displayed in frames, albums, or wallets and contribute to our identification as a part of this pictorial history. The photographer needs to stop and determine that the scene should be immortalized; the camera is used as a physical separator; taking the picture is an act of removing oneself from being a part of the action to the role of a more passive historian.

For so many for whom “seeing is believing”, what is often overlooked is the role of the photographer in the composition of the image. Even if the scene photographed is not manipulated or staged, the choice is still made to depict that particular scene, at the precise moment, and angle. It is this choice that is a product of an artist's personal agenda. Do they want to show the background or do a close-up on the expression? Should they reproduce the images in black and white or full color? Are they aiming to show the beauty of the scene or send a call-to-arms? Professional photographers often take multiple shots within a particular location only to later select among the prints for the one that most closely captures their memory of the scene as happy, sad, ironic, explosive or celebratory. Photographers are constantly making selective decisions that shape the outcome of the final product. When one views a photograph, it is not a direct connection to the actual event; it has instead been filtered through two other sets of eyes, both those of the photographer and the camera itself which limits the amount of information and heightens its importance. Even more than film, photographs are able to privilege a single image as an important consideration without the urgency provided by a moving reel; a photograph is sustained as a communication until its audience tears their eyes away.

  When Carter came across both the young girl and the vulture, he had to make the decision that this was something worth photographing. As a journalist, his focus was on an audience and readership outside Sudan , most of whom would never see the picture. This picture was intended to create an emotionally battering response among the intellectual, but ignorant, first-world public to the Sudanese crisis. This was the photograph that was going to spark media attention and make headway in bringing the global eye to rest upon this small, dry part of the world. Kevin Carter wanted to make people cry.

As the story was later reported, he waited for 20 minutes hoping that the vulture would spread its wings over the child in order to make the existing image that much more powerful. He had not directly influenced either the child or the vulture, given a choice he certainly wished that both were someplace else, but not given a choice and only a set-up, Carter hoped to take full advantage of the happenstance. So even though he had not created it, Carter needed the scene for his photograph. As Sontag explains, “Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a ‘good' picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing—including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.” 6

A picture is worth a thousand words

Photojournalists have used the camera as a professional tool to enhance the range and depth of emotion of the stories on which they report. Photographs let us get a literal “glimpse” into someone's backyard, living room, or office. They put the reader into the position of the unseen observer, both distancing them from the action of the scene that is unfold within the bordered image box, while also making them witness to it. Used to great effect, photographs lend credibility to written pieces and personify otherwise anonymous victims of disasters across the globe. In the words of Josef Stalin, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” and there is no better way to elicit empathy than by literally giving faces to the sufferers and allowing people to individualize the pain. With accompanying pictures, we are able to grasp the horrors of a single death instead of a statistic.

One of the inadvertent consequences of giving any story a specific human face, is that it may actually lesson readers' ability to transpose themselves into the narrative of the article. By providing a visually real protagonist/victim/character, the photograph dampers the mind's initiative to personalize the story and make it their own. People often have the same kinds of reactions to movies instead of books. While they read, their imagination is able to construct a visual environment that allows them to incorporate the familiar (friends, family, themselves) into the roles dictated by the rising action. With accompanying photographs, an article about something like starvation becomes a showcase of somebody else's troubles; one might cry out for that child and those people in the photograph, while another might be shaken by the thought that this could be my story and my child. The difference is very subtle and it is often as mistakenly interchanged as the terms “empathy” and “sympathy”, which frame the parallels of the two responses. Empathy is traditionally understood as an “intellectual and emotional awareness of another person's thoughts, feelings, and behavior” 7  while sympathy is “sharing another's feelings especially in sorrow or trouble through imaginative identification with the other's situation.” 8  Though obviously the inclusion of an image with text does not always necessitate an empathetic reaction over a sympathetic one, it does incline the reader towards a more removed intellectual observance as a price of arousing interest. This is part of the paradoxical nature of images. They bring us into the immediate private life of other people, strangers we think are left feeling like we intimately know, but our point of view is that of the photographer and not the subject; we imagine what it was like to be there, to take that picture, to have been an even more direct witness to the scene.

Carter's photograph elicits both feelings of empathy and complicity.

Death of the Messenger

Journalists, as a whole and photojournalists in particular, are in the business of using their eyes to open ours. They are messengers of what is happening in places that we are not able to visit ourselves. They are acting as proxies for our own eyes and in this case, the public's indignation was in part at Carter's omission in being our hands. People were quick to insist that they would have helped and that Carter should have. American feelings of liability stemmed from their relationship to the photograph as the photographer. His offense was all the more grievous because it felt like ours. That girl in the picture could no longer be helped, though there were probably hundreds of thousands more like her that could. Few, if any, of the people who wrote letters to the editors actually went to Sudan to participate in relief efforts. Desperate to myopically consider only this one child, New York Times readers were empathetic for her condition. Their feelings of true sympathy lay with Carter and their condemnation was an attempt to disassociate from the shame of his culpability in not doing anything.

Within the photograph there is always the subject being observed and the viewer who is doing the looking, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation that feels like knowledge---and, therefore, like power.” 9  With the knowledge of a man drowning, we are obligated under Good Samaritan law and our own conscience to do our best to save him. In a similar way, being made a witness through photograph requires an intervention. Everyone who now looks and closes the page is walking away from a drowning man. Bearing witness has the burden of responsibility and the photograph seems to incriminate all of its viewers. In this scheme of indirect responsibility, redemption is only found in intervention, one has to act upon the images and remove the passivity associated with “just looking.”

In 1994, Carter was informed that he had won the highest commendation in his field: the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. Not two months after accepting the award at Columbia University , Carter committed suicide. He had told friends that he regretted not helping the little girl in his most famous picture and in his last note he wrote of being “haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.” 10  The death made front page news and headlines and renewed interest in his winning photograph. People were rightly depressed, though many alleged to be unsurprised. It seemed somehow sensible that a man who had been witness to so much inhumanity had not been able to cope with his limitations to change the scenes he photographed. Some claimed him to be a victim of his own humanity.

Response and Responsibility

  Photographs are a type of knowledge that can bring you closer to the scene, to the people involved, and through their intimacy they create a sense of obligation. Bearing witness to something, even through seemingly removed mediums such as a photograph, forces one to confront the power dynamics of looking. Viewers are privileged to be able to sit back and reflect on the situation captured within the frame. The challenge is in coming up with a non-passive response. We do need to be critical readers of photographs as well as text. It is important to ask questions about the context, the intent, and the experience of the photographer, but it is unfair to assume that his role behind the lens is somehow more activated than yours in front of the image. One's failure to do something is just as relevant when one is only several feet away, as it is many oceans and on the other side off the world. Moral obligation and human compassion does not lessen itself with distance, in fact our visceral reaction to others' pain can be replicated through a visual representation, a photograph. Pictures are reminders of the infinite fibers of our conscience, whether or not we ever go to Sudan . It is vital to push oneself outside of the comfortable intellectual objectivity of empathy and truly sympathize with the pain of those within the photograph. It is only when we see others as extensions of ourselves that we can share their feelings and shared humanity.

  I came to college to learn about the world and just as importantly, to learn about myself. I think that the lesson that we should take away from Kevin Carter's life and photograph is the importance of doing something. His response was his through his role as a photographer, raising the awareness of millions of people around the world and certainly cornering me into confronting my own value system. I may not have liked all the images I saw in my class or all the things I learned about international famines as products of American politics, but now I know. I am different because I know and anything I do now, or don't, will be a test of this new individual and how well she can rationalize her separation from these events having only seen pictures. We are in some part responsible for the choices we make and those we don't; the essential thing to remember is that having seen something no longer allows ignorance to be an excuse in a decision of which we may not be proud.

References

1. Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography . Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd. 3.

2. Wikipedia contributors, "Kevin Carter," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kevin_Carter&oldid=125007069 (accessed May 7, 2007).

3.   National Public Radio. 2007. PBS Corporation. http://media.npr.org/programs/newsnotes/features/2006/mar/carter/blurb200_lg.jpg (accessed May 7, 2007).

4.  Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography . Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd. 12.

5. Macleod, Scott. The Life and Death of Kevin Carter.

http://www.thisisyesterday.com/ints/KCarter.html (accessed May 7, 2007).

6.  Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography . Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd. 12.

7.  Empathy vs. Sympathy. 2006. Montgomery Community College . http://faculty.mc3.edu/rbenfiel/NUR109/NUR109Caring/tsld014.htm (accessed May 7, 2007).

8.  Ibid.

9.  Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography . Toronto : McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd. 4.

10. The Ultimate in Unfair. 2006. Flatrock Organization. http://flatrock.org.nz/topics/odds_and_oddities/ultimate_in_unfair.htm (accessed May 7, 2007).