62 5 august 2019E
arlier this month,
when 26-year-old
Óscar alberto
Martínez ramírez and his
23-month-old daughter
Valeria were laid to rest in
a private ceremony in el
salvador, their deaths were
mourned across the world.
in the last week of June, their
bodies had washed up on the
banks of the rio Grande, the
river that separates Mexico
from the Us. the child’s
head was tucked under her father’s t-shirt and her right arm
was locked in an embrace around his neck for fear of being
separated from him during their perilous crossing. they
drowned trying to cross into the Us in search of a better life.
Mexican photo-journalist Julia le Duc captured their final
moment in an unforgettable frame that gained wide currency
on the internet in the days that followed. suddenly, people
and nations, who did and did not have any obvious stakes in
the immigration crisis, were moved by the enormity of the
moment they had witnessed. But even as the photograph
gained momentum, commentators drew attention to the
ethics of circulating such graphic images. and the name
that came up frequently in these discussions was that of the
american writer and cultural critic, susan sontag’s.
One of the best-known theorists of photography, who was
as concerned with the moral questions the medium threw up
as its aesthetic challenges, sontag became a household name
thanks to the Met Gala earlier this year, which was inspired by
the ideas in her classic essay Notes on ‘Camp’ (1964). in her
writings on photography, she asked urgent and difficult ques-
tions, many of which remain pertinent to this day:
By making public the spectacle of such tragedies, do
these photographs deprive the victims of the last vestiges of
dignity? Or do such images serve a larger social and humani-
tarian purpose by arousing the viewers’ collective concern?
Most crucially, how are we, the onlookers, expected to process
the message behind such horrific visuals, exposed as we are to
a barrage of such imagery on social media every day?
While these questions have trailed the evolution of
photography since its inception some two hundred years
ago, definitive answers are yet to emerge. as recently as 2015,
the photograph of the body of the three-year-old syrian
refugee alan Kurdi, who was drowned in the Mediterranean
sea while trying to cross into europe, became a flashpoint
of a global debate over the propriety of disseminating such
images. however, long before the internet and social media
turned the world into a global village, photographs have acted
as powerful instruments of propaganda.
in 1858, italian-born British photographer Felice Beato
travelled to india to document the grisly aftermath of the revolt
of 1857. although several of his photographs were staged
(Beato dug up the skulls of dead mutineers and arranged them
strategically to heighten the effect of his compositions), he did
manage to capture some chilling scenes of the hanging of the
accused. these visuals were not only meant to act as deterrent
against future rebellions, but also to boost the morale of the
colonial government to tighten its administrative grip over
the empire.
the camera’s potential would soon be harnessed in subver-
sive ways as well. in 1876-78, British civil servant Willoughby
Wallace hooper chronicled the devastating famine that raged
through the then Madras Province. When his photographs of
shockingly emaciated and malnourished indians, either dead
or on the verge of death, made their way back into england,
there was a public outcry over the success of the colonial gov-
ernment’s ostensibly ‘civilising mission’ in the tropics. hooper
was also severely criticised for staying aloof on duty, instead of
intervening and offering assistance to his desperate subjects.
in 1919, it was the turn of an indian, called Narayan Vinayak
Virkar, to use the camera’s power to the advantage of his peo-
ple. that year, after General reginald Dyer and his men killed
hundreds of innocent citizens by opening fire on them at
Jallianwallah Bagh in amritsar, Virkar decided to document
the aftermath of the atrocity by photographing its survivors
at the accursed site. he urged people who had lost friends and
family to pose next to the now-famous wall, riddled with bul-
let holes, pointing at the spots they had lost their loved ones.
as art historians Nathaniel Gaskell and Diva Gujral have
pointed out in a recent study, Photography in India: A Visual
History from the 1850s to the Present, the medium, from its
beginning, would thus act ‘as cure and as poison’, depending
on the perspective of the viewer. indeed, the practice of photo-
journalism, which began to emerge around the Great War and
matured on the heels of its successor, would draw extensively
on photography’s gift to act as a double-edged sword.
Born in 1933, sontag grew up in the shadow of World Wareye witness
By Somak Ghoshal
The Cruelty of Images
Could the assault of self-same images of suffering make us immune to their potency?