American writer Susan Sontag devoted her works to studying visual representations of war and violence in modern culture. Looking at the many photographs documenting military conflicts, she wondered how watching atrocities in the media affects people. This topic remains important for an everyday person living in a continuous information flow, who must be able to filter data and not allow it to manipulate consciousness. In this paper, the analysis and data collection methods were used to study the concept of manipulation and emotional impact in photography. Mandatory sources and articles by American and foreign authors to investigate the problem were used.
Sontag claims that an increasing number of photographers have begun to resort to exploiting negative feelings, such as compassion or anger, to form a specific attitude (2003, p. 63). This leads to the logical conclusion that photography can speculate on emotions, which contradicts the objective perception of the reality of photography. Empathy, which is often touted for its positive results, can also lead to warnings and limitations (Cameron, 2017, para. 7). Contrary to popular belief, empathy is subconsciously selective and does not extend to all social strata. Images of wars, refugees, and natural disasters make a person empathize with fear, anxiety, and hope (Lydon, 2016, para. 3). At the same time, people tend to be less empathetic to mass disasters than personal cases and show more empathy towards certain social groups. Passing through a person’s perception, photography loses its representative resource and interferes with understanding the disaster displayed.
Along with manipulating the target audience’s emotions, disaster photographs without context and captions can be used for propaganda purposes. Being part of citizen journalism, photography often helps to assess the political and social situation in the world, country, or state (Awofadeju and Ogwuche, 2022, p. 174). At the same time, photographers do not always pursue educational goals. Reconstructing an event captured in a photo requires more than just identifying what is depicted (Azoulay, 2021, p. 14). Although objectivity is an inherent property of photography, images are always created from a certain point of view. The photo’s composition forces the viewer to accept a perspective beneficial to a third party (Protschky, 2018, para. 2). Recording reality may run counter to the goals and ideals of the person making the recording. Photographs contribute to visual culture and are celebrated within the dominant mode of creating meaning (Saramifar, 2019, p. 480). Thus, the limit of photographic knowledge about the world can be narrowed both subconsciously and intentionally by the propaganda apparatus.
Shocking photos that resonate with the general public put people in a dilemma of whether to continue to be a witness or try to influence the disaster. Images of real horror may make a person think about how his privileges can be connected with the suffering of other people, which gives rise to the desire to stop. Also, photography often arouses rejection and disappointment, which generates the opposite silent effect. For example, numerous censure cases and negative public reactions to selfies taken under tragic circumstances have been reported in the media (Ibrahim, 2015, p. 214). Criticism may occur even when visiting areas after a natural disaster is pursuing a more obvious educational goal (Lichfield, 2014, para. 4). However, being individualists, people react to photos of local disasters in different ways and often use them for positive purposes. For example, photographs at the site of natural disasters may help planners move faster to restore destroyed objects (Meyer and Hendricks, 2018, p. 127). As a result, the moral dilemma lies in the psychological endurance of an individual and their characteristics.
From all of the above, it follows that the purpose of photographs depicting the disasters and sufferings of real people has mainly manipulative and enlightening implications. Due to the lack of a representative resource of photography as a phenomenon, it cannot serve as an objective fact of reality, contrary to popular belief. The dilemma of reaction to shocking photographs is often limited by the viewer’s psychological predisposition and internal values.
Reference List
Awofadeju, P. O. and Ogwuche, P. O. (2022) ‘Prospects and challenges of using photography and graphic design in civic journalism: views from journalists in the guardian newspaper’, SAU Journal of Management and Social Sciences, 2(2), pp. 174-183.
Azoulay, A. (2021) The civil contract of photography. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Cameron, C. D. et al. (2017) ‘Does empathy have limits?’, The Conversation. Web.
Ibrahim, Y. (2015) ‘Self-representation and the disaster event: self-imaging, morality and immortality’, Journal of Media Practice, 16(3): pp. 211-227.
Lichfield, G. (2014) ‘In defense of the disaster selfie’, Quartz. Web.
Lydon, J. (2016) ‘Worth a thousand words: how photos shape attitudes to refugees’, The Conversation. Web.
Meyer, M. A., and Hendricks, M. D. (2018) Using photography to assess housing damage and rebuilding progress for disaster recovery planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, 84(2), pp. 127-144.
Protschky, S. (2018) Searching for Indonesian histories of disaster in photography. Research Center for Material Culture.
Saramifar, Y. (2019) ‘The pain of others: framing war photography in Iran.’ Ethnos, 84(3), pp. 480-507.
Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the pain of others. London: Penguin.