San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Why context matters for photographs
Sharing on social media can lead to unintended consequences
Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine has forced over 5 million civilians to flee, creating what the United Nations is calling the fastest growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.
With this mass exodus, a flood of harrowing photographs showing the humanitarian plight has emerged. Given the fundamental power of photography, however, the desire to spread awareness of human rights abuses and the potential harm of showing difficult photos are not easily reconciled. Before sharing images of vulnerable migrants on social media, it’s wise to pause and consider the myriad ways a single photograph can wield outsized influence.
On several occasions during the past century, a single photograph led to widespread public awakening about the plight of migrants and quickly mobilized significant humanitarian support. Dorothea Lange’s widely reprinted “Migrant Mother,” first published in a San Francisco newspaper in 1936, prompted the U.S. government to send 20,000 pounds of food to California to aid the impoverished family pictured and others like them. In response to the gutwrenching photo of the lifeless body of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a beach in Turkey in 2015, the United Kingdom announced that it would accept 20,000 Syrians refugees.
While photography can move hearts and minds, it also poses ethical dilemmas. A viewer is never privy to how subjects feel about the way they have been captured, nor if circulating the moment enshrined on film (or in pixels) might perpetuate further suffering.
As migrants are, by definition, without the stability of permanent shelter, photographs typically show them struggling. Florence Thompson, who, in the late 1970s, self-identified as the “Migrant Mother,” felt strongly that her right to privacy had been violated and told the Associated Press that she and her family felt exploited by the photograph. In 2008, two decades after it became the face of a U.S. postage stamp, Thompson’s daughter Katherine McIntosh told CNN, “We were ashamed of it. We didn’t want no one to know who we were.”
Another problem with the pervasive sharing of images of migrants is that it tends to render their pain as ordinary and therefore acceptable. While viewers may initially empathize with the subject’s plight, repeat exposure inures us, and with each viewing, empathy wanes. With an estimated 95 million images shared on Instagram daily, only to be subsumed by another round of images the following day, depictions of desperate migrants can rotate among pet portraits and birthday party pics — placement that suggests the predicament of migrants as routine as opposed to an urgent crisis requiring mobilization.
Susan Sontag famously wrote in her 1977 essay collection, “On Photography,” about how the perceived meaning of any image is “blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it.” Consider how Agence France-Presse photographer Paul Ratje’s photos of U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback chasing Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border quickly became social media fodder last year. Millions of people circulated the images, in which reins appeared to be used as whips, in hopes of condemning the brutality of the Border Patrol. Yet, simultaneously, the images were also shared by those appalled not by the actions of the agents, but of the migrants, captioning them as “invaders” or “illegals” who needed to be “sent back to where they came from.” Some offered celebratory remarks, like “just happy that cowboys are back.” From this perspective, the visual tropes in photographs characterize migrants as people to fear rather than people fear.
Embedded stereotypes affect how people interpret images, particularly in the case of racist beliefs. Even in the instance of Kurdi, the Syrian toddler, perceived ethnicity was instrumental in the public’s sense of emotional urgency.
“The week before, dozens of African kids washed up on the beaches of Libya and were photographed, and it didn’t have the same impact,” Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch, told Time magazine.
Racial bias has already been apparent in the double-standard reception of migrants from the Ukraine. “They look like any European family that you would live next door to,” explained Al Jazeera’s British anchor, Peter Dobbie. Daniel Hannan, a conservative activist, Brexit campaigner and media personality wrote in the Telegraph, “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking.” Such biased coverage compelled the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association to release a statement urging the media to be mindful of perpetuating “prejudicial responses to political and humanitarian crises.”
Looking at a migrant in peril, through the intimate, yet distanced lens of photography, is no guarantee of empathy and certainly not of political action.
Photographs of migration have been at the center of the global news cycle for years, and the number of migrants globally is only accelerating. In 2019, there were an estimated 272 million people without homes, 51 million more than in 2010, the U.N. said. With these numbers, the circulation of images of migrants in crisis is likely to escalate as well. Though many may be visually striking, it’s unclear that endless reposting will result in sustained policy changes.
To be sure, photojournalism remains a powerful tool in the arsenal of free speech, providing access to vital information that otherwise wouldn’t be available. Professionals devote their lives to balancing the thorny paradox of what images should be circulated in public and their potential consequences. Photojournalists work in collaboration with professional organizations and editors trained to make careful decisions about what they share. In contrast, the ease of instantaneous reposts on social media obscures accountability and, when sources aren’t credited, upends a professional structure that has value.
Context matters. In photojournalism, photographs do not speak for themselves. Severing an image from the written context of its initial circulation — including information about the photographer and the legally responsible publisher — happens frequently on social media and opens the photograph to a gamut of unforeseen consequences.
In an age when digital images can travel with more ease than people and be endlessly repurposed without the consent of the subject (or photographer) and viewed by any audience in any context, it’s time for all of us to consider whether sharing these images may itself become a form of human rights abuse.
Before sharing a photo of a stranger, it’s worth asking: How might the subject feel about seeing this image distributed, and what might be the ramifications?
Showing images of violence and abuses of power in public is not inherently a liberatory act. Neither is the act of witnessing. Rather, critically questioning the sharing of such pictures may be a step toward reframing the system itself.