EVIDENCE
Knowledge is power, said Sir Francis Bacon—and photography greatly ex-
panded access to that power. Before photography, humans bore witness
only with their own eyes, and what were the chances that any person would
be in the right place at the right time? All other accounts were secondhand
at best; then, as now, the credibility of retellings was questionable.
Seeing is believing. But that’s not the end of it. Believing often leads tocaring, and caring can grow into action. Civil rights leaders understood
this in the years after World War II. If only white Americans could see the
disfigured body of the lynched teenager Emmett Till, or watch as snarling
police dogs attacked peaceful demonstrators.
A photograph is not a manifesto, nor is it an agenda. But it can stir up theground in which movements take root. The gradual shift in public opinion
against America’s war in Vietnam, for example, cannot be separated from
the photographs that documented the chaos and brutality. Or it might be
said that Barack Obama’s road to the White House was paved with pho-
tographs from Abu Ghraib prison, for Obama—alone among the major
candidates—had opposed the Iraq War.
This is why tyrants fear and manipulate photographs. Some images aredoctored; others are suppressed. In China, many college students have
reportedly never seen the 1989 image of a lone man confronting a column
of tanks in Tiananmen Square. The picture is too dangerous to the powers
that be. It might move others to stand up.