The Impact of War Photography

Black Passport, giving an intimate glimpse into the life of photographer Stanley Greene, left a great impact on me as a viewer. It shows how he is continuously swung back and forth from a safe home environment to another horrendous war zone. The manner in which these images are placed side by side, suddenly gives the usually anonymous war photographer a face, an identity. 

We see war images in newspapers, magazines, on television & Internet every single day, but it seems as though we are so used to seeing them that they fail to trigger our emotions. Perhaps it is the abundance that actually diminishes their power, their ability to emotionally affect us. Could it really be that the vast amount of horrible news images we are confronted with is desensitizing us from the pain and hardship pictured in them?

Being confronted by the media with all the horrors happening in our world, continuously, is not merely an aspect of the present. In the 1860’s, Baudelaire wrote the following in his diary: “It is impossible to glance through any newspaper, no matter what the day, the month or the year, without finding on every line the most frightful traces of human perversity… and it is with this loathsome appetizer that civilized man daily washes down his morning repast.” 

More recently, Susan Sontag (2003) argued that in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense. Perhaps the fact that we are aware of this makes us unconsciously somewhat mistrust the images that are thrown at us daily?

John Berger (1972) mentions another interesting factor that could diminish the impact of war photography. He argues that, since we are so used to seeing advertisements of all sorts intermingled with images of war and hardship in every magazine or newspaper, we begin to perceive both types of images in the same manner. In an extreme situation, this would mean that we aren’t grasping the graveness of war photography anymore, since we are looking at the images in the same state of distraction and disbelief as we look at advertising.  

A third explanation why we aren’t emotionally affected by the stream of “bad news images” we come across daily, could be that we simply choose to turn our heads away from them just in time as to not let the gravity of the situation truly sink in. We live in a culture where it is entirely normal to switch the channel or click to the next webpage when we don’t like what we see. After all, what could we do to change the horrific situation pictured anyways? 

According to Berger, war photography shouldn’t be leading to this passive state of thinking. It should be triggering us to actively engage in the situation by questioning or even opposing the political establishment responsible for the war. But how? The truth is, it is difficult to find a solution to the matter. However, displaying the photographs in a different context, as done in Black Passport, might be a good way to let the pain and hardship pictured in war photographs sink in more deeply. If only temporarily.

(All images: Stanley Greene)