Seeing Pictures of Murdered Children Isn't Going To Change Our Politics
The idea that it could springs from America's tradition of blaming individuals' supposed spiritual flaws for institutional failures
Should people see photos of those who have been murdered by gunfire? After Uvalde, in this piece Tom Jones at Poynter considers the argument that society tolerates hideous crimes because social conventions hide the horror. Media images only tell us children were murdered in Texas. They don't show how assault rifles tear human bodies apart. (Some of victims of the Uvalde massacre had no recognizable features left, and had to be identified by DNA testing.)
The case against showing these photos — the case for our conventions — is, first, that it would greatly pain the families of these children, and, second, distress millions of other people. And third (the hardest to admit), that the images could be appropriated by the depraved and wicked. All photographs can be interpreted in multiple ways, even a photo of a murdered child.
The case for showing such photos is based on two assumptions that may seem obviously true.
The first assumption is that the government fails to act because individual citizens are indifferent — they care, maybe, but not enough, for long enough. The idea is that a horrifying photo will stop you from sighing and turning to the Sports or TV section of the feed. Let's get you more upset! Then (second assumption) you will channel that feeling into political action, which will help change laws.
After all, as Susie Linfield wrote last month
Photographic images can bring us close to the experience of suffering — and, in particular, to the physical torment that violence creates — in ways that words do not. What does the destruction of a human being, of a human body — frail and vulnerable (all human bodies are frail and vulnerable) — look like? What can we know of another’s suffering? Is such knowledge forbidden — or, alternately, necessary? And if we obtain it, what then?
As Jones and Linfield note, people making this argument all cite the aftermath of the murder of Emmet Till in 1955, when his mother insisted on an open casket and permitted photographs. The photo published in Jet showed the world precisely how badly her son had been mutilated. This angry, brave and ethical decision is often credited with helping to advance the Civil Rights movement.
Perhaps it did. Certainly people who already cared very deeply believed that it did. But this is hard to prove. The evidence is much clearer that actual change in American society was a consequence of organized social movements (like the Montgomery bus boycott) and strategic politicking. Did individuals' revulsion and shame, those strong yet often fleeting emotions, play a role in those achievements? I don't know. Yet I think it more likely that people with unshakeable convictions and principles — not people upset about a photo — did more of the consequential marching, suffering, speaking and negotiating.
After all, strong emotions fade quickly. And if you're really distressed by them, there are a lot of tactics you can use to make yourself feel better — tactics ranging from smoking a joint to firing up Netflix to joining a Facebook group to whatever. What proportion of people who see a mutilated corpse will react by taking meaningful political action? And what is the point of their political action in a system that anti-democratically blocks it from achieving anything? They would be better off directing their outrage at that system than at the perpetrators of the daily atrocity.
But let us allow that the photographs of Till's body played a role in advancing the struggle against white supremacy in the 1950s. I still don't think photos of gun-massacre victims would achieve the same end today.
The Till photograph showed the world something that it pretended not to know. It contradicted the ideology of white supremacy, which confabulated a world of separate races, contentedly held apart, with occasional violations sanctioned by honorable white men. (Yes, that sounds insane in 2022, but this was the dominant narrative in a lot of white America in the 1950s.)
The Till photograph gave the lie to the notion that the men who enforced white supremacy were in any way decent, or that the beliefs they upheld were good and true. They showed them for what they were — not respectable citizens but monsters.
A similar unmasking effect followed from the publication of this photo.
It shows Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee who in 2015 drowned off the coast of Turkey and washed up on a beach. It showed the world the stomach-dropping horror that followed from policies aimed at keeping refugees out of Europe.
Have these policies been swept away? Nope. But it is probably safe to say that more Europeans care to oppose these policies than before this photo went round the world.
Photos of gun victims in 2022 would have no such unmasking effect. Almost everyone already knows that people who shoot unarmed children are monsters. Almost everyone knows their ideology is nonsense. We all know that these guns do horrific damage. What illusion is torn away by the sight of mutilated little bodies? What new, mind-changing information or sensation does it bear?
None, I think.
You might argue, though, that such images might motivate a few people to re-examine their beliefs, and take political action — that, in other words, showing such images would not have a downside, even if it didn't change the world.
Trouble is, the claim that politics needs people to be shocked and horrified does have a downside. It reinforces the idea that our political problems stem from individuals who aren't good enough. If only people cared more, if only you weren't so selfish or so easily distracted, we could protect these kids. That's a common move in American rhetoric: to shift responsibility away from institutions (and those who influence them) and put it on individuals. Whose fault is it? It's your fault! You don't care enough.
We all want people to care about the troubles we care about. (In the case of mass shootings of children, we are close to unanimous on the issue. On abortion or climate change, not so much.) We are encouraged when we sense that others care as we care. But to think that a hideous photo can change society is to ask caring to do too much work.
Yes it can motivate people to go to protests and sign petitions and vote, and that's great. But caring can't fix a political system with choke points and perverse incentives. The government isn't failing because you don't care enough. It's failing because such care as you can muster has been dispersed among hindrances, rendered irrelevant and ineffective. It's a cruel culture indeed that makes sure your concern is powerless and then tells you that you aren't concerned enough.
Postscript: After I posted this, Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker took up the question here. He has a different take on the problem of bad actors. It’s not just that a few people would put their own evil interpretations on such photos (“look how much mayhem we can wreak on the enemy!’’ or “I can prove these were faked!’’). It’s that the photos’ dissemination would be doing the work of the first bad actors, the shooters — giving them “a solo exhibition mounted before those most intimately acquainted with the victims, allowing the murderer to inflict harm not simply through their debased actions but by the very evidence those actions leave behind.’’