I met Ryan almost three years ago outside the entrance to the rail station parking deck in New Brunswick. He was panhandling and I handed him $5. He thanked me, said “bless you,” and he agreed to let me take his photo.
We talked a bit. His story was unremarkable, except in its absolute commonness, the reality that there are so many on the streets like him, so many that I’ve met over the years. This kid in his mid-20s was a victim of the opioid epidemic. Ease of access to drugs like oxycodone and fentanyl allowed them to proliferate on the black market, which facilitated his self-medication. He started with alcohol but moved on and told me was clean for a few months at this point. That didn’t last, apparently, and I heard through the activist community that the kid died.
His picture (posted to my Patreon page) — with broad smile and wild eyes, t-shirted in the warm October sun — is one that sticks with me. I’m no photographer, but the act of taking that cell-phone photo and the brief moment I spent talking with him etched the image in my mind. Remind me everyday — as the photos taken by my friend Sherry Rubel for our books As An Alien In a Land of Promise and Beggars Can Be Choosers remind me — that capitalism’s warped priorities have a very real human toll.
It also serves as a reminder of the power of images, of photographs, which Susan Sontag described as “experience captured,” as “furnish(ing) evidence,” passing as “incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.”
The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects.
This is deceptive, of course, which Sontag admits. Photos have their limitations. They
get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them.
They are both evidentiary object and commercial good, reliable except when they are not, dependent on context that too often we ignore. Photos are not unvarnished truth, a concept that is illusory, but evidence of point of view, of a relationship tying photographer to subject to viewer, each of whom participates in the creation of meaning.
Ryan’s image tells us very little on its own. It relies on words I’ve attached, his words filtered through my reporting and writing. How you see him, then, is dependent on what I tell you. Without my narrative, he could be any fan of the New York Yankees.
I bring this up in response to a very good column by Charles Blow in The New York Times. Blow asks a fairly basic question that has troubled news organizations and society as a whole for decades: Should our media agencies — print and broadcast, web and social — show photos of the victims of mass shootings to demonstrate “what rounds from high-powered rifles can do to the human body”?
This is a difficult question, as Blow admits.
There are some thorny questions that must be thought through. What makes one image worthy of publication but not another? Would the publication of one, or some, open the floodgates to most, if not all? Could the images simply become part of the gore that is three clicks away on any web search, elevating it to acceptable, common consumption? Could it have the opposite effect than intended: allowing copycats to use the images in a game of one-upmanship, or online trolls to wield them against the families of the victims?
Blow ultimate sides with showing the photos, arguing that “the public’s need to know has overtaken its need to be shielded from horror.
In fact, on some level, not allowing the public access to some version of the gore is extending a form of disinformation, permitting a warped, naïve or incorrect impression to persist when it could be corrected.
Blow, essentially, is arguing that showing the grizzly photos will prod the public to do more to end the carnage, to lend momentum to the gun-safety movement so that, in turn, can force political institutions to act in our interest.
We saw this, he says, with the momentum given to the Civil Rights revolution when Mamie Till Bradley demanded an open casket for her son Emmitt Till, who had been beaten and tortured in Mississippi, and her willingness to have his body photographed and the photos run in the black press.
And we saw this, I would argue, in Vietnam, a war that may still be the most photographed war in history, and that likely had its course reset by public outrage over the images.
Images have many currencies, however. Pictures of lynchings across the South were turned into post cards and kept as mementos. As such, they were transferred into the commercial realm, traded like baseball cards, and did little to alter the nation’s racial attitudes. (See Martha Collins’ book, Blue Front, a book-length poem that explores this.)
Today, images are cheap and common. Smart phones, the internet, social media, have streamlined not only the process of taking photos and videos but of distributing them. And the digital revolution has allowed even the most amateur among us to manipulate images in ways that have audiences unsure if what they are seeing is real, while giving those willing to follow people like Donald Trump down any rabbit hole ammunition for their mix of lies, distortions, and disturbing beliefs.
I want to believe that Blow is right, that publishing what would be disturbing images might shock the populace from its delusions, and it may just be worth trying to do so. We shouldn’t get our hopes up.