Bryony Gordon
How shocking images change the world
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but the photo depicting the final moments of Alison Parker’s life said remarkably few, if anything at all. It is an image that has the power to render you entirely speechless; it makes you want to turn away or clamp your eyes tight shut, as if doing so might prevent the inevitable. I don’t need to remind you of it by republishing it here. One glance, and it is in your brain for ever.
And that, I think, is a good thing.
I didn’t think this at first. At first, like many others, I did not want to see the pictures that were unwittingly captured by Parker’s employer, and I certainly didn’t want to see the ones that had been captured by her murderer. The pictures are brutal and appalling, and the screen grab of the news anchor’s shocked face back in the studio is horrifically poignant. It all seemed so exploitative and voyeuristic, not to mention
encouraging to any other maniacs who might happen to have a thirst for blood and notoriety.
But then I heard the impassioned plea made by Parker’s father, Andy, for US gun legislation to be changed, and I realised that the rights and wrongs of publishing his daughter’s photo as she was murdered were not what we should be discussing. The morals and ethics of media outlets are not the real issue here, and debating them only stops us from addressing the true problem: the routine slaughter of American civilians with guns. According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, an average of 31 Americans are murdered with guns every day. That means that since Alison Parker and her colleague Adam Ward were shot on Wednesday morning, almost 100 people are likely to have been killed. (Another jawdropping statistic: in 2010, 15,576 US children were injured by firearms, compared with 5,247 soldiers wounded in conflict in Afghanistan.)
The terrible truth is that had Parker and Ward been victims of a “routine” shooting (and by this I mean one in which their deaths were not captured on film), we probably wouldn’t know about them.
There are no pictures of the victims of the Sandy Hook massacre, and thank goodness for that. But had the American public seen what a Bushmaster .223 calibre rifle can do to a small child, maybe President Obama would have got his gun control legislation through; maybe Parker and Ward would still be alive today.
In 1955, Mamie Till insisted that morticians did not touch the face of her murdered 14-year-old son Emmett; she had a public open-casket funeral for him so that the world could see the brutality that had been meted out to her son while visiting relatives in Mississippi (Emmett had his eyes gouged out before being shot in the head). This brave act by his mother galvanised the American Civil Rights Movement. Mamie was not going to allow the public to forget her son.
Images can be powerful. The US government knew this after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago. At the time, pictures captured the shadows of vaporised victims burnt into walls, not to mention the horrific wounds of survivors, but they were suppressed in favour of cinematic mushroom clouds that wouldn’t be quite as frightening to a world that it wanted to turn nuclear. Remember the picture of nineyear-old Kim Phuc, running away from her home in Vietnam after it had been attacked with napalm? The report by Michael Burke that showed shocking footage of starving people in Ethiopia? The photographs from Bergen-Belsen? All of these were watershed moments. Horrific as they were, these pictures changed the world for the better. They had to be seen.
So, yes, the pictures of Parker are distressing and horrible and not what one wants to look at when one is trying to go about a nice, comfortable life. But seeing is believing – and hopefully, as before, it can also be about changing.