As troubling images greet us every moment across all media, whether social media or popular media like newspapers (digital or otherwise), the power of photography is even more evident in its powerful messaging and capacity to move the world.
We are all familiar with iconic photographs that brought wars to the living room – the napalm girl running away from the inferno in Vietnam or the breaking of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Iconic moments like that, when recorded visually, evoke powerful emotions of awe, fear, revulsion, and horror, often leading to people demanding systemic changes.
Photographs of the First World War brought the realities of war to the consciousness of the common people who thought of it as something noble and necessary as they didn’t have to face its harsh realities.
It was only when grainy photos from the battlefields of Europe entered newspapers that the true price of war was understood by common people.
Photographs can move the world to action. It can bring together diverse communities to jointly call for the end of war, strife, climate action, or social change. Images of the 2004 tsunami brought home the awful power of nature and the consequences of not taking climate change seriously. Subsequent visuals of forest fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes have only re-asserted the impact of these pictures.
Photojournalism, documentary photography, or storytelling through photos have the power to move society and “shed light on important social and political issues and to bring about change”, according to photographer and filmmaker Angel Sanchez.
Today, everybody is a photographer and this is, in many ways, positive because we can capture realities that previously would stay hidden. Social ills, inequalities, and abuse of any kind are all routinely documented and published, much to the consternation of the people concerned. The additional boon is that such photos can be widely shared for immediate effect.
Of course, this kind of power is not without its risks and possible fallouts. Like all other creative mediums, photography is a tool in the hands of its creator, at first. Later, once out in the public, it stops being the property of its creator and gets a life of its own, as viewers interpret possible meanings.
The ethical questions regarding sharing troubling photographs will continue to be debated. When asked how photos of war are taken without feeling sympathy or trying to help the victims, photographers often speak about the need to keep emotions outside the job, which is one of informing and documenting.
In spite of its ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, photographs have an intense and immediate quality. It has its own language and follows its own rules. It reminds us of the importance of the moment, and the need to memorialize it.
Award-winning poet Carol Ann Duffy describes the chore of the war photographer who documents “A hundred agonies in black and white/from which his editor will pick out five or six”. It is a hard, thankless task but one that promotes questioning and social change.
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