In Response to Something I Read

I wonder, for those growing up in my generation, desensitized by media and the internet, if we see images of great atrocities, horrific scenes of death, dismemberment, famine, and holocaust less as warning of what we should not do, not as learning from the mistakes of the past, but as a great beacon hanging above our heads. “This is what people do, given the chance, so it has been, so it will be,” it seems to say, “protect yourself lest you fall into the abyss, feel lucky, do not incite the worst.” There are too many piles of the dead to count, unfathomable numbers in places we have never seen and cannot really understand. It is a powerless feeling sometimes.

I remember watching a documentary about Liberia, about the war torn country, and was unable to look away. Seeing their deaths was one thing, dead bodies has become passe, but there was something captivating and dreadful about how they lived. I have learned of the systematic rape of women in the Congo, and studied just how far people will go, such as the cutting down of neighbors in places such as Rwanda, the genocides and civil wars. The existing lives more of an impression than the remains.

They say post-modernism was in part a response to the failure of the modern world, since the modern world produced devastation and the atom bomb. How can we live, as a people, after the fall of the atomic bomb? But my generation has always lived under it's shadow. Mankind is no longer redeemable, in so much that it seems it is our very nature to make war and reap down the ever present “other”. Virginia Woolf seemed insulted when asked “how shall we end war”, taking issue with the “we,” saying it was a male problem, not a female problem, that women did not make war, did not want war. But I think it is a human problem. Photography has the chance to either give a face to the “other”, and deny the anonymity that makes them easy to kill, torture, to force into naked pyramids and chop up with machetes.

But then... what of Rwanda? They knew the people they killed. Is there any force that can save us from ourselves? Perhaps the role of the image as it pertains to war is changing. I cannot say for sure. The still censor the images of the dead, they still aim to control it, because perhaps we still care about images of “us”, but as the population grows and subcultures become more consuming, how long will that last. Will we go unknowing into the blind void, or drown in the weight of our images?