OPINION: Pixelated Truth

Neil Degal

On June 1985, National Geographic introduced the Afghan Girl to the world. With her sea green eyes haunted by the war around her, she was able to haunt the world from the cover of magazine. After 17 years, the world now knows her as Sharbat Gula. After all the years, her eyes are still sea green, still haunted and angry. You cannot fault her for that. More than twenty years of war, 1.5 million killed, 3.5 million refugees is the tale of her nation.

Sharbat Gula, perhaps, is the moment in time a photographer lives to capture. A moment that defines an aspect of humanity. English art critic John Berger said that ”photographs remind us of the lived reality behind the abstractions of political theory, casualty statistics, and news bulletins.”

Along with the shrinking of the world due to modern technological advances, is the convergence of personal spaces of people. Technology is catalystto the lines of the personal being blurred and lives of strangers coming together at a single point. Part of your existence in the World Wide Web is the exposure to hordes of photos. Images, particularly those snapped frame of reality, affect us. Involvement, though, ends after the push of a button.

From time to time, photos become iconic because they present a reality so harsh and true. French photographer Oliver Ciappa’s photo of Florent Manaudou and Frédérick Bousque, both top world swimmers, as an imaginary couple to Georgina Wilson and Isabelle Daza’s controversial kissing photo, took on the discrimination against homosexuality. Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer-winning photo of a Sudanese child crawling towards a United Nations feeding station as a vulture lurks nearby addressed the famine in Africa. Photos become iconic because they talk about real people and real situations.

Still, without understanding the context of the photo reduces it into a table of information. Modernity taught us to be satiated with the whos, whats, wheres, and whens. The heavier questions – how and why – are left unasked. In such arrangement, photos become impersonal and public, they become very little information about the life, memories and experiences of a distant stranger.

American writer Susan Sontag added that public photographs enable outsiders from the experience know of the pain felt, but not necessarily feel it. Liking or sharing becomes a testament of pity.

“So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence,” Sontag said.

Sharing and liking turns the plight into a commodity. Life becomes commodity. Freedom is no more than a bread you buy. Happiness is indirectly purchased. Response to their plight should be outside the emotional tendencies. We need not just feel but act out our empathy.

Without asking why and how we are blinded and merely become viewers of their experience. Making sense of a photo is a step to helping others not suffer the same fate as those captured by the camera’s lens.

Photos, on their own, will not change the world. It will not topple regimes of the corrupt and cruel. It will not feed the hungry. The first step in affecting change is for people to know and understand.

In every photo there is a story. When you know the story, you know what is at stake. Lives of children of the universe. The right to be accepted by the society. The freedom taken away by oppressors. A change can only come when people know, and when they do, it is for them to find ways to help the world be better for all.

We are after all humans, not cold and dead statistics.