Introduction
Although photography is about 200 years old, it remains a paradoxical thing in a meta sense. Every technical element and mechanism involved in this practice has undoubtedly been an objective technological advancement.
As Sontag (2003, 24) points out, “photographs were superior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past.” However, when photography was introduced into the field of visual art, it was met with criticism and dislike from many artists and thinkers. A significant body of critique back then was because photography does not require any expertise or skill from its creator since it was believed that the technology creates an image and not a person.
Experts say that “it was originally considered a mere skill rather than a form of art” and “photography was seen to be more part of technical knowledge rather than art on its own” (Photoportrayal 2020, par. 1). It was eventually and rightfully recognized as an art form along with its technological extension of cinematography. Still, its fundamental paradoxical quality, as well as some bias from creators and audiences, persists.
Nowadays, the central contradiction of photography lies in its socio-artistic functions. These include delivering the creator’s meaning or message, evoking emotions and thoughts, and showing a moment of reality. Many believe that contemporary photographs’ most incredible power is “to crystallize and instantiate the meaning of events in images of iconic significance” (Orvell 2021, 13).
However, some types of photography, such as catastrophe, disaster, and war, do it wrong, according to Sontag (2003). She argues that these categories cannot develop effectively and fully empathy, compassion, sympathy, anti-war and pacifist sentiments in the viewer (Sontag 2003). The topical research question is why and how the design, purpose, and ethical aspects of photography of suffering fail to enhance empathy in a person successfully and instead develop opposite feelings in them, such as numbness and apathy.
Photographs of Suffering are Flawed by Design
Figurative and Literal Superficiality Leads to Audience Indifference
The very design of the photographs of suffering displayed for evoking empathetic and humane feelings in one does not allow for this. One of the essential purposes that drive photographers to develop their works is sharing and telling the stories and emotions of people “living with disaster, in the present and future” (Protschky n.d., par. 22).
For them, the essence lies not only in capturing the moment as a tragic intersection of human destinies and external circumstances, time and space, but also in an emotional charge strong enough to raise the same feeling in the individual viewing the image. Photographers, military and disaster ones especially, want their audience to connect psychologically with the personas and setting of the image to understand the message and become more empathic.
The critical problem is the lack of depth of the message embedded in the photograph. In many cases, it figuratively and virtually becomes superficial, just like the medium on which it is visually imprinted. The history of military confrontations proves that it is easy to promote a martial spirit in society and propagate the need for war as a practical political measure.
An anti-war and pacifist message or any call for empathy is a complex and multilayer act of partial or absolute deconstruction, and it requires more artistic resources than a captured moment. Superficial ideological delivery combined with the fact that viewers “can’t imagine what it was like” results in an unintended wrong psychological response (Sontag 2003, 125). Consequently, the person begins to feel indifferent to such photographs, if not apathetic.
Limited Subjectivity of the Creator and No Emotional Directions for the Recipient
Another thing that makes photographic design unsuccessful and ineffective in conveying people’s suffering to a remote and uninformed person is its over-objectivity. Sontag (2003) explains that photography consists of an objective aspect, the captured episode of reality, and a subjective one, the photographer’s perspective. The problematic thing here is that when visually analyzing an image, the viewer generally perceives only the objective component unless the artist mentions the other.
Simply put, the audience is left to consume the fact of suffering caused by war or natural disasters, but not how to interpret and relate to it. As a result, they are free to feel about these images, which sometimes leads to indifference, apathy, apprehension, or fear, which are opposed to empathy and sympathy. The photography design provides little structural space for the author’s subjective contribution and direction, and such absence often misguides viewers about the meaning and message of the pictures. Interestingly, other forms of art do not limit the subjectivity of artists in their creations as much.
Fundamental Problems in Display and Distribution of Suffering Photographs
Some critical design issues of disaster and war photographs that create the opposite effect of the intentional humane one are also present in the modes of display and distributions of images discussed. Photos with such narratives are often placed in art galleries and museums (Sontag 2003).
The public display does not allow the viewer to be left alone with the artworks in terms of both time and emotional connection. The observer’s mind is given insufficient time for deep analytical activity and the development of the implied mental response. It is another factor that prevents the formation of a proper empathetic psychological linkage between the mind of the recipient and the author’s message in the photograph.
Surprisingly and paradoxically, the Internet is also one of the things through which photographs of disasters, traumas, and people create an anti-empathic influence. It is not about the qualitative component of suffering photography but the quantitative one in this case. The online space is an environment with massive flows of information poorly controlled, and one is exposed to numerous and diverse data. Experts say that “the longer people watch terrorism coverage, the less intense their reactions are to the images of terrorism they see” (Hoffman and Kaire 2020, 1666).
Consequently, they “often become numb as the number of victims increases” (Ye et al. 2020, 1). Some people attribute the current information overload of such photographic materials to the fact that they are made not to spread awareness of adverse events but “to remember” them (Lichfield 2014, par. 4). Although the cause is ethical and virtuous, it makes the distribution flaw discussed even harder to fix. The numbers will continue to multiply along with the cases of unintentionally caused opposite feelings.
Section’s Summary
As one can see, there are significant fundamental flaws in the design of the photograph of suffering people. They create emotional effects opposite to the empathic and anti-war sentiments in observers. Unintended emotional responses in the form of numbness, apathy, fearfulness, and similar feelings emerge from the lack of depth in the intended message and ideological directions for the viewer and the limited subjective artistic space and tools for the creator. All this is multiplied by the inefficient physical display and online distribution of photographs involving suffering, which increases the chance of viewers developing negative behavioral patterns.
Contradiction in Social Function of Disaster Photography
Photographic Knowledge and Political Awareness
Another contradiction of disaster photography lies in its being a mechanism or at least a driver of social transformation. Photographs of human suffering caused by nature or other more hostile individuals perform it through conveying visual knowledge and the sentimental motivational imagery to take political action. The nature of the knowledge that such images often carry is also political and aims at developing an awareness of the exact nature but can only reach the viewer’s conscience. It is because “what a photograph “says” can read in several ways,” in the modern times of hybrid and informational wars especially (Sontag 2003, 29).
A sense of civic duty or an inner voice awakens in the person, but they have doubts regarding where to direct this drive so that their efforts are consistent with their socio-political intentions and interests due to the numerous interpretations of the imagery. Again, the lack of a creator’s perspective undermines photography’s artistic and societal power.
Photographic Knowledge and Ethical Awareness
Calamity photography also promotes societal transformation through its call to the ethical principles of the community and the individual. However, this does not provide political awareness either, only the conscience that was mentioned above. Refugee photography asks the observer for a reaction but does not provide the complete knowledge for one to gain moral self-awareness about the ethical issue captured.
The reason is the high political and ethical contextuality of images in photographs of this kind (Lydon 2016). It is less of a contradiction and more of a dependence on the picture’s ideological power in the political context, the photographer’s skills, the general public and authorities’ ethics, and the viewer’s mentality and intelligence.
Major and Minor Ethical Dualities of Disaster Photography
Big Ethical Dilemmas of Calamity Photographs
Disaster photography’s ethical aspect is another problematic element since it is essentially a dilemma. Images containing content of suffering people or natural catastrophes do not arouse only empathy in viewers and do not postulate the importance of adherence to high moral principles nowadays. The existence of the phoneme “disaster porn” objectively proves this statement (Ibrahim 2015, 214).
Instead, they challenge their observers to whether they are capable of empathizing with the person portrayed or not. In the morally negative outcome, they will become emotionally abstracted or even envious of the experience of being in such a rare and extreme setting. It is only the first superficial or major ethical dilemma of photographs capturing calamities.
Small Ethical Dilemmas of Calamity Photographs
Each of the ethical directions implies another more nuanced minor dilemma. In the traditional or moralistic way, this is a choice between genuine empathy and simple compassion. Cameron et al. (2017) consider the latter as a more resource-efficient emotion in terms of inner experience and outer expression. The egotistic way of the minor dilemma is to induce the viewers to either emotionally distance themselves from the suffering depicted out of fear or apathy or become jealous of the photographer’s accomplishment. This selfish and unethical desire for thrills is perhaps caused by humanity’s escape from the Malthusian trap.
People today have much more free time than their civilizational ancestors due to the lack of the need for constant search and cultivation of food. The struggle of a person with boredom and standardized being is one of the principal activities of modernity. Interestingly, some people combine these ethical paths under the umbrella of solidarity (Huber 2019). The overwhelming majority experiences moralistic sentiments or the opposite mood.
Conclusion
This academic paper explores the central paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas present in disaster photographs. The research idea is that this type of photography’s design, social functioning, and ethical component are flawed and cultivate in the audience emotional responses such as numbness, apathy, fearfulness, or even envy, opposing by nature to empathy and sympathy. In this paper, both the opinions of scholars, historians, and photography experts such as Susan Sontag and amateurs have been applied.
Another significant mention is that the hypothesis developed and shown here, together with all the inferences formulated, is based on Sontag’s thoughts on disaster and war photography. She was one of the pioneers of the idea that photographs of these categories function improperly or insufficiently (Sontag 2003). One of her conclusions was that pictures are too small a medium to portray and convey anti-war and pacifist meanings fully, and other art forms such as books do this better (Sontag 2003).
This essay serves as a conceptual addition and extension to Sontag’s conclusions. One hopes that these seven pages will motivate such liberal arts professionals as historians, media and cultural scholars, and art experts to academic inquiries into the topics discussed.
References
Cameron, C. Daryl, Michael Inzlicht, and William A. Cunningham. 2017. “Does Empathy Have Limits?” The Conversation. Accessed May 8, 2022. Web.
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Huber, Mary. 2019. “How Is Disaster Photography Sublime?” Frieze. Web.
Ibrahim, Yasmin. 2015. “Self-Representation and the Disaster Event: Self-imaging, Morality and Immortality.” Journal of Media Practice 16 (3): 211-227. Web.
Lichfield, Gideon. 2014. “In Defense of the Disaster Selfie.” Quartz. Web.
Lydon, Jane. 2016. “Friday Essay: Worth a Thousand Words – How Photos Shape Attitudes to Refugees.” The Conversation. Web.
Photoportrayal. 2020. “When and How Photography Became Art.” Photoportrayal. Web.
Protschky, Susie. 2018. “Searching for Indonesian Histories of Disaster in Photography.” Taking Care Project. Web.
Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador.
Ye, Zheng, Marcus Heldmann, Paul Slovic, and Thomas F. Münte. 2020. “Brain Imaging Evidence for Why We Are Numbed by Numbers.” Scientific Reports 10 (1): 1-6. Web.