Photographs of Agony

'Photographs of Agony' by John Berger (1972), digested by Rachel Segal Hamilton

What's it about?

How much photojournalism can change things for the better is subject to ongoing debate. One of the earlier writers to raise the issue was John Berger in this essay, first published in New Society magazine. Referring to a Don McCullin photograph of a wounded Vietnamese man and child, Berger considers why it has lately become acceptable to publish such graphic images. 

He gives two reasons. First, that newspapers are responding to readers who want to see the truth. Second, that readers have have become desensitised to these images and newspapers are publishing ever more shocking pictures to win their attention. Dismissing both explanations, Berger suggests a third: that these photographs can be published precisely because they don't make viewers question who might be responsible for the violence. If they did then papers – in thrall, he says, to the political establishment – wouldn't publish them. 

So what effect do they have? McCullin's images often capture moments in which time suddenly seems to pause – the instant a person cries out in grief, say. For viewers, time is similarly interrupted as we are, briefly, overcome with the victim's pain. But we mistakenly interpret this interruption as our own moral failure because we can't respond directly. We either think, "Well, what can I do?" and do nothing, or try to assuage our guilt by donating to charity. War photographs don't lead us to query the political systems under which wars take place – they just make war seem like some awful but inevitable feature of human life. 

In his own words:

"[Photographs of agony] bring us up short. The most literal adjective that could be applied to them is arresting. We are seized by them.” 

“The reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war.” 

“What we are shown horrifies us. The next step should be for us to confront our own lack of political freedom. In the political systems as they exist, we have no opportunity of effectively influencing the conduct of wars waged in our name.” 

How to sound as if you've read it:

War photography - what is it good for? Making us feel bad about ourselves and despairing of humanity.