PICTURE POWER
The influence of iconic photos
According to the United Nations, about 2,500 migrants have died or disappeared trying to get to Europe this year. No matter how sympathetic you are to all the victims, I bet you can only picture one of them.
Until Wednesday, few people in Canada were preoccupied with plight of Syrian refugees. Now it’s a federal election issue and the mayor of Ottawa is offering the city’s help. The facts of the humanitarian crisis didn’t change this week. All that happened was the distribution of a single photograph.
Within hours, the devastating image of a lifeless toddler was being added to the list of iconic shots that have defined historic moments, from the euphoric — the sailor embracing a woman in Times Square at the end of Second World War — to the grisly — the gun pointed at the temple of a Viet Cong soldier by a South Vietnamese general, seemingly snapped at the instant the bullet was fired.
Since the dawn of the daguerreotype, photographs have not just captured history but changed its course. Some images, like the heart-wrenching shot of Kim Phuc running naked from a napalm bomb in Vietnam, have spawned documentaries to explore the story behind them, some 90 minutes of footage and thousands of words expended to amplify and explore their impact. Others, such as the historic raising of the U.S. flag in Iwo Jima, have inspired monuments, rendering the images permanently back to three-dimensional form.
The power of pictures is selfevident: they’re worth a thousand words, right? But that exchange rate doesn’t even begin to describe it, any more than saying an airplane is worth a thousand shoes. As we’ve seen this week, a photo doesn’t just do more, it achieves an entirely different and substantially more potent effect. Data and words are rational, demanding understanding and analysis, prompting discussion and counterpoints. Pictures are penetrating and visceral — we react to them more with our hearts and guts than our brains.
You can forget or ignore information, but the most powerful images are not easily shaken. Try to block from your mind that famous shot of Karla Homolka’s creepy glare. See if you can forget the single hooded terrorist peering up from a balcony in the athlete’s village at the Munich Olympics.
The picture of the boy on the beach is particularly potent and provocative because it portrays a single victim, transforming a complex and unfathomable disaster into a plain, discernible tragedy. Think of the firefighter carrying the bloodied infant from the wreckage of the Oklahoma City bombing. Three thousand people died on Sept. 11, 2001 but the image I can’t get out of my head, 14 years later, is the falling man, the inverted body dropping to the earth, the familiar vertical lines of the doomed World Trade Center behind him.
As Mother Teresa said, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” We relate more quickly and easily to the death of one person than to a pile of bodies.
Photographs are definitive, or at least they seem to be. They appear to tell the whole story, to close the debate, not inform it. How do you argue with a photograph? And yet a picture is inherently both reliable and deceptive. The truth it tells is a frozen distortion of reality. The falling man was never suspended upside-down; he tumbled. The video of the Vietnamese execution is far less evocative than the photograph that stops time in the instant between life and death.
Eddie Adams, who won the Pulitzer Prize for that image, later expressed regret at the impact it achieved. “The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera,” he wrote. Adams later apologized to the general for the irreparable damage the photo — distributed widely without the context that might mitigate what viewers thought about his choice to kill the man — did to his reputation. “Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths.”
The image of Alan Kurdi isn’t misleading; it clearly illustrates a single, shattering consequence of a sweeping humanitarian crisis: the death of a child, the expiry of hope. But in the realm of public discourse, the nuances are ignored and rational thinking is short-circuited. A photograph can simplify an issue, but there is also the risk of over-simplification, compelling us to immediate judgment and sparking demands for action — any action — as long as it’s swift and decisive.
Studies have shown that people respond and act differently when they are in an analytical frame of mind as opposed to an emotional one. Present a series of relevant statistics and the public will think of an issue one way. Show them a photograph and their reaction is of another kind.
Often, the only way to offset our grief, our disgust, is to set in course a dramatic response or find a villain. Within minutes of were ready to blame his death on the Canadian government — or, more specifically, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, mostly because he didn’t perform well in a televised interview.
Of that sort of reaction we must be careful, especially in our time. A single image has never had the potential to have more impact. Today, there are exponentially more cameras and the mass distribution of images is no longer at the discretion of experienced editors. Any debate over whether they should be circulated is pointless. Before the discussion even begins, the image is already ubiquitous.
And despite the constant media, one image can still rise above them all, a clarion only heightened by the accumulated and instant reaction of others. In place of shots heard ’round the world, today there are shots shared instantly across the globe.
The greatest deception of a photograph is that its compellingly simple message can point us to an equally straightforward solution. A powerful image should oblige us to take notice of an issue, but we can’t ignore the complexities or the magnitude of the problem. Neither the photo of Alan Kurdi nor the crisis in Syria are black and white. We can react with clear hearts but we must respond with analytical minds.
The picture of the boy on the beach is particularly potent and provocative because it portrays a single victim, transforming a complex and unfathomable disaster into a plain, discernible tragedy.