When a picture is worth a thousand woes

Shelley Walia

Professor and Fellow, English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University

My pictures are about making people realise we’ve got to protect those who can’t speak for themselves.

— Michael Nichols

To shake the world out of its stupor and languor, photography presents a moment to pause and consider the horrors of hunger and migration, of race and ruthless discrimination. The visual image becomes a powerful agency of documentation, of instant expression, as well as an art form transmitting emotions more explicitly than the language of words.

The more I see the images of racist violence, of the dispossessed sea of humanity travelling hundreds of miles by foot to reach their homes, of homeless migrants being turned back by xenophobic immigration policies, or a white policeman pinning his knee to the neck of an African-American, the more I am compelled to think that the world must rise above the frenzy for labels of race, gender, caste, religion and political bias, and begin instead to address as one people the issues that are far more crucial to humanity.

The image of the lonely toddler pulling the sheet to wake up his dead mother on a railway platform in India recently collates in my mind with the iconic picture of a vulture stalking a famine-stricken three-year-old boy for which Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer prize in 1993. The child is struggling on all fours to reach a UN feeding centre a short distance away at Ayod in Sudan. It is utterly reprehensible that it took the plight of the helpless and the most vulnerable members of the citizenry to make the world sit up and take notice.

This draws me to a picture of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy lying dead on the beach after being drowned in the Mediterranean Sea near Bodrum in Turkey. His Syrian family had been trying to reach Europe on a small rubber dinghy which capsized at sea. Face down, still in his shorts and shirt, his picture has seared our collective memory and jolted the world into a derisive recognition of the sheer scope and toll of the humanitarian refugee and migrant crisis.

Compare these metaphors with the horrifying picture by Nick Ut, the Vietnamese photographer, of a terrified nine-year-old girl, Kim Phuc, running naked after a napalm bomb burnt her clothes and body during the Vietnam War near Trang Bang on June 8, 1972. You will get a jab in the ribs visualising the trauma of suffering, an abstract concept transforming into an excruciating picture of the wretched of the earth. The picture has come to define the very horror of war, a dark tragedy culminating into undying hope for a better world full of love and forgiveness, the raison d’être of Phuc’s writings and lectures over the years.

The images turn into artefacts, powerfully instrumental in instigating a dramatic upturn in international concern and a surge in public fury over the plight of the famished millions. Through the pathos evoked by the images, the living begin to cross over and emotionally relate to the objective correlative of the pain of death and the misfortune of being stripped of basic human rights. The impact of such events is profoundly moving, striking a deeper connection with the people.

A progressive debate on race, poverty and migration, therefore, gets the impetus for worldwide remonstration against the militarisation of the State after the repugnant video of the cop choking an African-American in Minneapolis. Likewise, Aylan Kurdi’s drowning inspired the vision of a world without borders or the sight of a hungry, motherless child on the platform spurring the long-delayed initiative of the Supreme Court of India to wake up to the condition of the famished and dying migrants. The representations become a mark of history, an explicit eye-opener for the global community to share impartially the accountability for not assisting and hosting refugees in accordance with the principles of international solidarity and human rights.

They say that a rising tide lifts all boats. Why then is the rising tide still leaving millions struggling to stay above water? How are we to feed, clothe, educate and gainfully employ the migrants and the underprivileged, walking hundreds of miles, creating a crisis of epic proportions, with the world looking on? How are we to keep our cities safe, to ensure that we have equal access to decent healthcare, food and water? Instead of examining these issues, people in positions of power remain embroiled in the struggle for power even if it means misery for the millions.

Those who are fanning the flames of predatory capitalism, of toxic racism and violence, continue to engage in the most dangerously retrogressive practices using political and financial muscle to enact policies that offload risks and volatility onto the marginalised while themselves remaining increasingly remote from their communities, insulated by their unjustifiable privileges. The political game has become so devious, so sectarian and so extreme that the population is being strangulated with divisiveness, whereas the educated elite, the talking heads in the media and the worthless political leaders, engage in a war of ideology and thought, a power struggle to prove the validity of one’s position over the other.

The poignant images preserved as visual documents, therefore, often goad a conscientious citizenry to halt the pernicious descent down a death spiral before sinking so low that it becomes impossible to claw your way out. The pathos of the dead child on the shore or the sorrow of the child endeavouring to wake up his dead mother might touch again our collective conscience to rouse the much-needed process of healing of these schisms between the rich and the deprived, between the well-stocked and the hungry, between the black and the white. The telling of these stories through photography may hopefully augment public understanding of human rights, compassion and perhaps, even generate policy change.

Every incident of violence based on any criterion — religion, caste, gender or economic status — stands unreservedly damned in the images that draw us so overwhelmingly to the calamity of astonishing dimensions requiring an unparalleled humanitarian outreach. It’s our responsibility as global citizens to rally around those most defenceless in our midst. And it is up to us to ensure that starving children or the helpless victims of war and racist politics, who have perished in search of justice and a better life, do not die in vain. We, as a human race, owe them that much.

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