I've been paying close attention to bumper stickers and car art in general, and noticed the phrase 'Never Forget, Never Again' on number of cars, with reference, and justly so, to Sept. 11th, 2001. In thinking of things to paint on my own car, I tried to think of other events that one should never forget. I never found a way of transposing the idea onto the car, but instead started compiling photos along that theme. The Holocaust, slavery, use of nuclear weapons, and also 9/11 are some themes that I started developing. In doing so, I found myself not shying away, and quite actively seeking, shocking photos. It is in my nature to acknowledge both the evil and good in human nature, both the joy and darkness of life. And therefore, I don't avoid movies with non-Hollywood endings, or brush aside a friend who is depressed and not in the most uplifting of moods. Likewise, I feel a need to read, see, and learn about the tragic, horrible, and despicable acts humans are capable of, without turning away. Some themes I have a great interest in, the Holocaust being the one that first comes to mind, for the depths of the horrible seem to have no end. [It always amazes me how some people prefer not to see yet another documentary on the Holocaust, with the excuse they know about it already. There are too many details worth knowing for that to be close to the truth. Most importantly, no single book or movie, or anything short of having gone through it, will allow you to 'know about it'. Well, if that's true then what's the point? To get as close as you can, to understand, to not allow yourself to forget.] No pleasure-seeker would sit through a viewing of the Shoah, or read Primo Levi. It is not a morbid interest that draws me to it. But a refusal to look away, and the truth of George Santayana's words "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

The theme of which photos to see and make public has been recently in the headlines in two events surrounding the US occupation of Iraq. One, the publication of the horrific photos of US Americans burnt, shred apart and hung in Falluja. That the photos were even shown was concievable for press editors because they were not Iraqi civilians, nor US soldiers, but rather US civilians working for Blackwater Security Consulting. The other, the photo of flag drapped coffins of US soldiers being shipped back home.

The photo was taken by Tami Silicio, a contract employee from the Seattle area who works the night shift at the cargo terminal, and was published in the Seatle Times on April 21st. As a result, Silicio was fired for violating US government regulations that prohibit photos of coffins of US soldiers, supposedly to protect the privacy of the families. Ed Lowe, a Newsday journalist, recalled in an commentary (April 28th) how he would scan the wire services for names of soldiers Killed in Action in Vietnam, figure out where their families lived and visit them to get comments. He observed how "without fail, each time, the stricken family would graciously invite me into their home, eager to share the biography of the child they had lost, proud of his service and nonored by the suggestion that his sacrifice would not go unoticed, nor unnoted." Its pretty obvious that the government policy is not to protect the families, but the public image of the government and manage public opinion on the costs of war.

There was an interesting piece by Jim Lewis Front Page Horror: Should newspapers show us violent images from Iraq?, which came out on April 5th, in slate.msn.com. Lewis is a photojournalist who has been sitting on photos he took in Ituri, Congo in 2003, for he finds the horror in the pictures seem to get in the way of conveying what is actually happening in that civil war. Curiously, in Feb 2003, Lewis engaged in an online discussion with Luc Sante, another photojournalist, a propos of Susan Sontag's book Regarding the Pain of Others. In that discussion, which one can follow on salon.com, Lewis defended publishing photos of atrocities. But as he himself explains, having taken such photos changed his mind.

I cannot argue this issue without opening a back door and stating that never having witnessed an atrocity I cannot state categorically that I would never change my mind on this issue, as Lewis did. However, his perspective is that of a photojournalist. His preocupation is whether horrific photos are the best purveyors of information, or whether they are distractions. "History, context, and culture all make the events in Fallujah very different, but history, context, and culture are precisely what a picture can't show, at least not one picture alone." He's right, but it remains that such photos reflect not only a specific context (e.g., civil war in Congo), but also the ability of humans to perform horror on other humans. From that perspective, that of a citizen, such photos are I think always informative. I can read about cutting a person's scalp, but I can't even begin to understand its horror without a visual reference. Not to say that text does not have its strengths. And it is from good journalistic writing that we get most our context and information, and even to some degree our link to empathy with victims. And years from now, when we look upon those pictures of Falluja, we won't learn the whole story, but for those that know the context, they will work as a good reminder of the extent of resistance against US occupation.

I think emotion has muddled the issue for Lewis, for many of the problems he raises are not specific to photographs. Later in his slate piece, he states "pictures of extreme violence are always a kind of pornography: There is an outrageous event. There is the fact that someone was present with a camera to record it." That is an interesting sidepoint, which reminds me of the 1994 Pulitzer-prize winning photographer Kevin Carter, who took the photo of the dieing Sudanese girl and was haunted by having not intervened, became depressed, and committed suicide.
But then is it not pornography for the media to camp outside of people's houses for a comment. To flip flop from sports to war to weather. To bait us with suspenseful comments before a commercial break. Newspapers are not exempt. I find it incredible that the New York Times has a narrow horizontal news piece on a massacre with the rest of the page and the facing page containing advertising for Tiffany's and Macy's.

I am concerned about the media using photos for their shock value. But that is something they already do. Barry Glassner, in Culture of Fear, notes how as crime was decreasing in the US the news coverage of murders and other crimes soared. That is an issue of media ethics, they have an obligation to provide context. Does their failure in doing so, mean that they should also not show the photos in question?

We should also be concerned with emotional saturation and numbing. But that is something that happens also with textual news. After years of hearing news about a conflict, someone paying half-attention to events will meld them together, loose the train of events, context, become somewhat indifferent to an additional dead civilian, an additional bombing. And who can follow so many conflicts worldwide? Who can stay fine-tuned to events in Colombia and Honduras and Congo and Ache and Haiti and Sudan and Iraq and Chiapas and Chetchnya so on and so on. Again, this is not something specific to photos. In a way, they allow us to capture more events, and somehow try to find a common thread.

Lewis again, "shocking photographs become horror-porn very quickly and very easily, more quickly and easily than language does. A picture can do many things that a paragraph can't, but enlightening us about the horrors of war isn't one of them." In an interview on NPR, the interviewer recalls reading how a shopping card was found among a victims personal effects, and how reading that gave him a deep connection, humanized the victim. To return to the context of the Holocaust, I read a number of personal accounts of survivors. Reading these, particularly in book form, gives you the element of time, of continual suffering that seeing a photo cannot offer. But how could I really attempt to recreate the experience in my mind without having seen any images, the experience is so beyond my own. Clearly, text and image are complementary. In what they have to offer and in the dangers their over-exploitation entail.