2017-08-06

On the web: How We Should... / Sarah Sentilles / The New Yorker

On the web: How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering by Sarah Sentilles / The New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-we-should-respond-to-photographs-of-suffering/amp


How We Should Respond to Photographs of Suffering

Renty, a man taken from the Congo, in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850.
Renty, a man taken from the Congo, in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1850.
Photograph by J. T. Zealy / Wikimedia Commons



Several years ago, while staring at a photograph of torture on the front page of the newspaper, I began seriously asking myself a question that many people had asked before: What should one do when faced with images of violence?
...
Then I read Ariella Azoulay’s “The Civil Contract of Photography,”...
It’s not empathy she’s after; she wants action. Images can transform the world, she argues, and the only reason they haven’t yet is because we don’t know how to look at them. The problem isn’t images; it’s us.

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