AZ: Is it accurate to say that news is more visual now than it ever has been? And if so, what does that mean? Does it make it more immediate, more accessible? And what are some of the issues with consuming news via an image-led platform like Instagram, whose algorithm prioritises visual (as opposed to text-based) content?
JG: Actually, there is precedent for this. Life magazine, for a long time many people’s main source of news, was highly unusual when it began, as a distinctly image-led platform in which words took second place, not only in terms of the amount of space they took up, but in the sense that photographers and their images led the stories and dictated the balance of news values. And in a further parallel with Instagram, words became relegated to the status of captions and description. Opinion differs, of course, as to whether that was a good or a bad thing, but in my view it makes sense that this kind of news consumption exists in an ecosystem, alongside other platforms that give words the prominence and space that they need.
To me, the biggest shift characterising Instagram and other social media platforms is not the prevalence of images over words, but the increasing prevalence of moving images over still ones. This shift, psychically speaking for viewers, is profound. In my current work, I’m preoccupied with still photography’s ‘fixity’; its inherent propensity to distance and to master, which is potentially disrupted by the moving image. But I also know that moving images have a greater power to traumatise, especially when they come to us unbidden, confronting us with horror that we cannot hold metaphorically at arms in length in the way we can with a frozen, stilled image.
For previous generations of news consumers, photographs tended to reach us after a time lag, presenting a stilled version of a past moment, and so offering a much more stable form of engagement with violence. Now, they come immediately or even in real time, unfiltered, unedited, often with video first and stills afterwards. Crucially, when images come before the words that explain them, we have no frame of reference, no warning. The key question is not which historical period was the more visual, but rather this temporal dislocation: how time works in each. This is a difference that photography theory — even psychoanalytic theory — is not well equipped to understand.
AZ: Obviously another major difference is the proportion of footage that comes to us from civilians on the ground, filming on their phones, as opposed to images that come to us from professional photojournalists with backing from press organisations, conflict training, and professional equipment. What kinds of new advantages and/or problems does this pose?
I feel that in some ways the immediacy and rawness of citizen journalism seems ‘truer’ — not least because there isn’t a team of people deciding whether to go ahead and publish it or not, so it’s less mediated by multiple voices and agendas — but what do professional photojournalists provide that civilian images don’t? And how do ethical questions around images of war change given the far shorter distance between photographer and subject?
JG: For some time now, the only photographs coming to us out of Gaza have been from those already living in or based there, including professional Palestinian photographers. As in any war zone there is a mix of professional and amateur, but considering how compromised the area is in terms of internet connection and electricity, and the conditions under which these local photographers are working, many of the images are really striking in their compositional effectiveness. As a teacher, I spend a lot of time talking about the aestheticisation-of-suffering critique: the idea (originating in the 1980s, with some quite ferocious critics like Martha Rosler) that there is a disingenuousness to photography that creates visually pleasing depictions of war and suffering, flattening its complexity into an arrangement that serves to soothe rather than challenge the viewer. But in the past few weeks I’ve noticed in my own media consumption a softening of this view. I’ve found myself avoiding certain social media feeds where I know I’m likely to encounter a lot of citizen photojournalism — vital as it is — and instead kept to more mainstream sites carrying professional imagery, because in general I know that these images will convey the horror in a form that is literally easier to look at. It’s my way of ensuring that I’m able to stay informed, to not look away. But this is an ethical compromise: it’s a great privilege to choose to see ‘easier’ images of war.
I also know that, although not perfect, information from mainstream sources is more likely to have been factchecked. If my priority was getting news immediately, as quickly as possible, I’d be looking to different feeds and platforms. But personally, I would rather wait a beat, and know that the reporter had waited a beat; to get my news at a two-hour or even a two-day remove.
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