Witnessing Future Violence
On images from Gaza: A Conversation with Dr Jennifer Good
If you’re reading this, you — like me — are experiencing the ongoing crisis in Gaza not as a proximate physical reality but as the news: as images and information. Footage and photographs are streaming towards us without end. We’re trying to understand — to feel, to respond to, to take action around — something happening far away, at least in part by means of the shock of these images from the ground.
Why think about images at a time like this? Why does this matter at all? Well: private, image-led companies like TikTok and Meta have become major news sources, and as such have the power to direct our attention, or to disable the accounts of key witnesses. Celebrities are sharing misattributed photographs of dead children. Journalists, and/or their families, are being murdered to suppress the dissemination of the information and images that could prove and verify the atrocities taking place. Telegram groups are sharing celebratory images of dead and injured Palestinians. Children on TikTok are taking part in trends mocking the bombarded in Gaza.
As Gaza is now all but inaccessible — to journalists, money, aid — and its power and internet are cut off, an ever-greater percentage of the images that find their way to us are coming from civilians rather than professional photojournalists. In the age of ubiquitous cameraphones and social media, images of war are raw and immediate in a way that feels new. A young Gazan journalist I follow begins every video by announcing she is ‘still alive’. Watching on our phones, from our normal, boring, blessed lives, we feel helpless; our ability to meaningfully change anything is limited by our ineffectual governments; and the images keep coming. They demand our attention. And so — what next?
In amongst the despair, the casting about for ways to help, to resolve feelings that cannot be resolved, I am thinking about the pictures. I want to know: what exactly can images do during a time like this, and what are their limits? Does ‘raising awareness’ help? What happens when social media is a source for our news? Can we fully process and understand images of death and devastation? Do we have a responsibility not to look away? At a time when images often come to us without context, how can we improve our visual literacy? Do images taken by civilians change the way we see and understand conflict? What can history teach us about how to respond to images of war?
I’m grateful that Jennifer Good was open to sharing her knowledge and expertise with me in order to think some of these questions through. As she points out, in the case of images coming out of Gaza, ‘this is not aftermath’. These photographs and videos are the present, and — as she points out — they are the promise of more to come. These are the stakes of what we’re seeing.
My questions are not new, even if our technologies and means of distribution are. ‘How to respond to the steadily increasing flow of information about the agonies of war was already an issue in the late nineteenth century,’ Sontag wrote in 2003. ‘One can feel obliged to look at photographs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show.’
Later on in that book, she argues against cynicism about the value of such images as tools for effecting change. She cautions the reader, too. ‘Compassion is an unstable emotion,’ she warns. ‘It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.’Â
Speaking of which, here are some resources. Keep going.
Dr Jennifer Good is a writer and Senior Lecturer in the history and theory of photojournalism and documentary photography at London College of Communication, UAL. She is the author of the books Photography and September 11th: Spectacle, Memory, Trauma (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Understanding Photojournalism (Bloomsbury, 2017), and writes regularly across scholarly and commercial platforms on photography with an emphasis on violence, psychoanalysis and power.
Alice Zoo: I guess a place to start is to consider the objectives of a conversation like this — what are its limits, and what can we hope for? I’m coming from a place of feeling helpless, exposed to a ceaseless stream of devastating images, not knowing how best to think about them beyond the immediate bodily response of shock and despair, and where to go from here.
Jennifer Good: As an academic I’m not, in general, very comfortable with the present. I prefer to work as a historian; responding to things with some space and temporal distance. But that’s not an option right now. I feel, in many ways, that I’m relating to this stream of images on just the same terms as anyone else. No better equipped, except with a particular kind of historical awareness, and a knowledge of the critical debates that circulate in the background.Â
I’ve been navigating these questions in my own work for years — questions of how much graphic violence is too much; of whose interests it serves; of the right to see versus the right not to see, as well as the right of victims and their loved ones to remain unseen in death. This war, like the ongoing war in Ukraine that has preceded it, is continually, in real time, recontextualising the canonical literature on photography and death. As it does so, I watch, recalibrating my analytical relationship to these scenes of death and devastation, reconsidering my point of view, ethical values established and positions taken. In the words of Jacqueline Rose, ‘this is what war does to theory’.
Theory, at a time like this, can feel inadequate, detached, impotent. But that’s a view that needs to be resisted. bell hooks said ‘I came to theory because I was hurting.’ It is not inadequate. It just needs to be pushed at, challenged and stretched to meet the urgency of the moment.Â
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.Â
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. Â
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.Â
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?Â
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.
AZ: I’m thinking about what’s commonly said about the ways that fiction, or narrative in general, make life more intelligible to us by removing extraneous detail, even despite the fact they’re constructed and to some degree artificial. I’m also thinking about trauma as an experience nailed to the present: the way that sufferers of PTSD, when triggered, are brought physiologically back into the state they were in when the trauma took place. It’s almost like amateur videos, chaotic and without narrative, are a direct visualisation of trauma, and that’s what makes them so arresting and provokes such an immediate physical response, and makes them such a potent tool. Narrative being applied, by means of composition, is a kind of making-sense-of; perhaps that makes it more possible for us to integrate the things we’re seeing, but the cost is some level of authenticity.
JG: Yes, I agree. And I also think, despite what I’ve said above, that citizen journalism is vital at the moment. There is a clear political and humanitarian need for these raw, pre-narrative images, alongside the ones that come to us from further along the timeline of psychic integration. However, the clinical psychologist Judith Herman wrote that traumatic memory exists like ‘a series of still snapshots’; the role of therapeutic process is to arrange them into an order with a beginning, a middle and an end.Â
Coming from a different critical perspective, in his 1997 book, Open Sky, Paul Virilio writes about the advent of 24-hour rolling news, saying that, rather than time unfolding in the form of conventional narrative succession (before, during, after), media audiences are increasingly accustomed to perceiving time in terms of abrupt and discontinuous ‘irruptions’ of varying intensities. Because of the way in which wars and violence are represented, they are not in fact represented at all — just presented, in eternally simultaneous real time. This, then, was a new kind of trauma — Virilio calls it a ‘pollution of distances’ or a kind of collapse. In order to comprehend it we need space, distance from the image, which we currently do not have. Representation is fraught, but these and other writers persuade me that we need it if we are to be any use in activating a response to violence.
AZ: That makes me think of the collapsing of contexts that happens on Instagram and feels especially charged now: that we’re seeing intensely disturbing images of violence alongside pictures from brands, colleagues posting career achievements, friends’ holiday pictures, celebrities, whatever.
JG: I see that. But it’s also what life is. There is no vacuum in which images have ever come to us, or could ever come to us, in pure isolation — traditional news magazines have always had lifestyle advertising placed right next to war photography. So, this may be one of those things that feels more unprecedented than it really is. We’ve always had to filter, parse and switch our responses to different kinds of images alongside one another.
Another way of thinking about social media is that maybe, rather than simply decontextualizing images, it can actually contextualise them more fully or more flexibly. Someone posts an image, and others can immediately comment, engage, repost, recontextualise and layer other information, other images on top of and around it. Maybe that can be seen as a democratic, dialogic and collaborative kind of meaning-making; not just an alienating shitstorm of discordant images alongside one another.Â
It didn’t take long for Ukraine to be called ‘the first TikTok war.’ The New Yorker reported in March 2022 that for Ukrainian civilians, ‘the war has become content, flowing across every platform at once.’ TikTok and Instagram are, as much as anything else, ‘platforms for networked flows of information’, in which not just images but information of all kinds interact.
In the context of a war that continues as we are talking right now, this flow is a matter of life and death. This mobility, in contrast to the traditional fixity of photography, can break the temporal frame of stillness even when the images themselves are still, turning them from mute, spatially-orientated signifiers to things that speak, testify, interact, and respond. Language flows around them, too. There is great scope for activism here.
And the flipside of an increasingly unregulated, unedited space in which disinformation can proliferate, is that people — photographers included — can change their minds. We’ve seen this a number of times already in this conflict. It’s an uncertain space, but I believe in the importance of being able to change one’s mind, even — or especially — in a very public way.
AZ: I’m wondering about the way that on Instagram we often come to these images unprepared. If we go to a news website, on some level we’re prepared to see images of conflict and devastation. On social media, you can’t really know in advance what you’re consenting to when you log on; in times of conflict, as now, maximally disturbing images are shared widely and so seem to seek us out. When that happens there can be a reflexive looking-away, because we’re not prepared. Is there a risk of becoming desensitised, if we’re seeing so many images, of such extreme subject matter, and so continually?
JG: No, I don’t believe in the idea of desensitisation. Another term that’s sometimes used to describe this effect is compassion fatigue, which to me feels more accurate because it reflects the fact that when most of us encounter streams of horrifying imagery, if we eventually feel the need to look away, it will not be because we have been desensitised. It will be precisely the opposite; that we are too sensitised. It’s a generalisation, I know, but I do believe that in the face of the unrelenting suffering of others, when we feel compelled to look away, it’s only to avoid our hearts becoming entirely broken.Â
AZ: On a really basic level, what does it mean to look at images of death? How do we respond?
JG: As the end of the Covid-19 pandemic blurred into the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Jacqueline Rose asked the question, ‘what do you do with death and dying when they can no longer be pushed to the outer limits of your lived experience or dismissed from your conscious mind?’ She is not suggesting that we should drag death out into public view and look it in the face as a kind of cathartic punishment. ‘How can we ensure,’ she rather asks, ‘that death, as much as life, is given its dignity?’ These are truly existential crises, and Rose’s point is that it’s matter of psychic survival to be able to bracket death off in order to go about our lives. We have to take seriously what it means to be confronted by so many of these images, because we are not equipped for it.
Writing some years ago about the September 11th terrorist attacks, I was preoccupied with the question of whether photography was of any use in the process of healing. I saw so much faith being put in photography as catharsis, as a tool to process and remedy loss — such a heavy burden of desire — and yet, I couldn’t help concluding, it ultimately represented nothing more than a dead end, doomed endlessly to repeat that already twinned act of spectacular violence.
But this situation is different. The function of these photographs of death, now, is not primarily to offer any kind of way forward, to contribute to mourning or recovery, or to trap us in an endless loop of paralysis. It is something else — much closer to the imperative that is called, within the history of photojournalism, bearing witness. In themselves, the pictures take us nowhere, and give us nothing. But together, caught up in a flow of words, of other images, of pictures moving and still, they might create a collective response that leads to intervention.
If this situation was in the past, I would say different things about it: ‘be kind to yourself, look away, take a walk, make a donation.’ But this is a different kind of existential crisis. I have no right, in this instance, to prioritise self-care or to advise it to anyone else. Protecting or healing from the trauma of looking at these images is not the priority right now. Â
AZ: It feels like, especially in the current moment, there are particularly high expectations of, and high pressure on, the sharing and distribution of images. It’s much easier to not bother reading the full length of an article than it is to not see an image, hence the heavy burden of desire, as you put it.
There are demands, from sceptics, for images that prove the truth of what’s happening — casualty figures, for example. Then there’s the search for the image persuasive enough to finally mobilise sympathy (Dr Hala Alyan in The New York Times: ‘We are up at night, combing through the flickering light of our phones, trying to find the metaphor, the clip, the photograph to prove a child is a child. It is an unbearable task. We ask: Will this be the image that finally does it?’)
How can we reconcile ourselves to this — that people are being forced to share the most intimate and devastating moments of their lives in order to prove their humanity?
JG: I could trace some of the lines of critical debate around these issues. One of the biggest is this question of dignity: on the one hand, people shouldn’t have to be pictured in the worst moments of their lives, in order to move the dial of public opinion or policy. But then there is the argument from Ariella Azoulay, who, in her game-changing book The Civil Contract of Photography — and the origin of her proposition is actually the plight and representation of Palestinians themselves — claims that photographs are not just documents, but presences. They are a lived encounter with a person; and we live that encounter again, in a different way, every time we look at them. This is what she means by a civil contract: we have a moral obligation to the person in the photograph.
But what does that mean if, as you say, a person is having to share the bleakest and most undignified moment of their life in order to be seen as human at all, or someone that’s worth responding to? Unfortunately, the repetition of images of suffering from the Middle East, and the racist double-standard by which images of, for example, Palestinians have been continually subject to different editorial treatment than those of white people over successive decades, means that many audiences are conditioned to see them as less human in the first place. Arguably, it’s a lack of images of ordinary life, of joy, of play, of love and everyday dignity that unequally dehumanises Palestinian people in the eyes of the rest of the world — not just their suffering.Â
AZ: It feels like maybe there are three ways of understanding images: that images used to be documents or reports, saying ‘this is what happened’; and then, per Azoulay, we could start to understand them as encounters; and now, more recently but especially in the context of this specific conflict, their explicit demands on the viewer have been turned up a notch further, and images have become pleas. Now more than ever before it seems as though images are attached to messaging (captions, posts, etc) saying ‘please look, please pay attention.’
JG: Because of this long historical legacy of dehumanising, for Palestinian people — of what we might call the politics of their visibility — the bar is perhaps even higher in terms of what they have to show to us in order for this plea to be taken seriously. But again, it feels significant to me that the premise of Azoulay’s radical concept of a citizenship — a contract between human beings, mediated by photography — is predicated upon the statelessness of Palestinians. It’s applicable to all kinds of photographs of all kinds of people; but it came directly out of her analysis as an Israeli thinker, that Palestinians may not have citizenship or statehood, but photography might offer a different kind of belonging. That’s the hopeful thread of her argument, and the challenge.
AZ: I’ve been thinking about the way that images seem absolute in ways that text doesn’t. The current refrain of the reticent goes, ‘this is a really complicated issue, I’m trying to understand all the sides’ — it feels like writing, for some reason, is more susceptible to this kind of response, where images feel unarguable, or absolute. A photograph of a dead child is a photograph of a dead child; it’s harder to resist with arguments about complexity.
JG: Yes, the history of this conflict and occupation is really, really complicated. But the present is not. It is stark and straightforward how unequal this fight is, and what is at stake. The images are there. This is something that photography can do.Â
AZ: Then again, it also feels like the flipside of that absolute quality of images is the possibility that images can be quite crude instruments, communicating best in extremis. Does constantly seeing images of devastation, bodies, etc, eventually result in only one kind of violence being able to capture our attention (as opposed to the structural violence of the occupation, which has been going on for far longer)?
JG: Types of violence that unfold gradually, slowly and without spectacle — ‘slow violence’ — pose a challenge to photography. On the one hand, Rob Nixon, who is credited with coining this term, associates it fundamentally with invisibility; with changes that are imperceptible or out of sight. But others, like Thom Davies, argue that it is usually only ‘out of sight’ or ‘invisible’ to the privileged — it depends who you ask and whose experiences you pay attention to.
This has been one of the failures of photography in the history of this conflict, as in all conflicts. It is not good at capturing structural things; only symptoms, superficial out-workings and surfaces. A really clear historical example of that is the fraught use of photography to cover famine. Famine always has a complicated, multifactorial set of causes, but photography can only photograph the graphic symptoms that occur when it’s already too late. Not only is prevention impossible by that point, but those simplistic images also simplify its causes and absolve viewers of any responsibility, reducing it instead to nothing more than an ‘act of God’.Â
And in Gaza, it’s not just that photography has not been good at capturing the slow, structural violence of the occupation, it’s that it’s been ignored and marginalised as a story. In many ways it is too late, but in other ways, these photographs have a shocking futurity to them as well; an urgency. They’re not just showing us a spectacle of violence that we can no longer do anything about, but of violence that is yet to come.Â
AZ: What happens when an extreme moment passes and there aren’t new images aren’t coming out about bombardments happening an hour ago, and the images go back to being harder to visualise, and structural?
JG: One answer is that, thankfully, we live in an increasingly diverse image and media ecosystem. There are photographers committed to staying with this story, just as there always have been. And there is photography that is pushing boundaries in terms of photographing structural conditions; finding new and creative modes of address that really engage the viewer’s imagination. Those types of photography tend to reach a smaller audience — they won’t appear on the evening news — but I remain grateful that they exist.Â
Another answer, however, is that once those immediate images start to fade and the news cycle moves on, this, precisely, is part of the structural violence. It’s the apparatus at work. Invisibility is part of the violence, and the oppression.
AZ: Is there anything we can bear in mind when trying to learn to parse images that come to us on Instagram with little context? Is there a framework that a typical social media user — especially one who’s not in the photography industry and hasn’t spent much time thinking about photographs, ethics, etc — can use to think about the images they’re seeing, a way of improving visual literacy? I’m thinking about how easily images can be used to spread misinformation, as well as the kinds of ethical frameworks that we come to understand in photography education but that are perhaps less intuitive or less well understood outside that context.
JG: I’ve always been an advocate for visual literacy, for slowing down our process of seeing and receiving images, to make room for critical reflection and questioning. On the one hand, we’ve already seen that this is now more important than ever. But on the other, we don’t need to fact-check every image or question its source to be impacted by the greater truth that’s in front of us; the more urgent imperative is to respond to the images which we know are showing us a humanitarian catastrophe in progress.Â
Part of me wants to encourage people to spend their valuable time writing to their MP rather than verifying an image source. Part of me would almost rather not advise people about how to be boundaried against being traumatised by images. Part of me would rather say: let yourself be traumatised. We have a responsibility, perhaps, to be affected by images of future violence in a way that we don’t so much by violence that we know is in the past. But at the same time, I want to acknowledge with compassion what it means to face these images. And I also know that traumatised audiences are of no use to Palestinian children.
AZ: Could you speak more about this idea of futurity, about the way these images speak of future violence?
JG: What I mean is that all of the theory that I have at my disposal, about how to respond to images of death and catastrophe, has to do with aftermath. But this is not aftermath. During previous humanitarian disasters — the most pertinent one in this case being the Nazi Holocaust — the photographer’s role was to prevent us as an international community from looking away, to ensure that the same could never happen again. This situation is different, for many reasons. But one of the differences is that the images are not coming to us afterwards, revealing the true scale of something that we were told was happening but could not be sure. We are being told in no uncertain terms that this bloodshed will continue, it will escalate, it will get much, much worse. One of the conventional limits of photography is that it cannot show the future; cannot imagine, fantasise, or foretell. It cannot have a role in revolution because it can look only at what was and what is. But in this case, it is showing us the future. And so the stakes are very different.Â
As you and I are speaking today, we’ve just been told of an internet blackout in Gaza. There is a coming void of invisibility, and so we have to trust the images that came last week, foretelling what would happen this week and in the days to come. This is the test of photography’s civil contract. Photography is holding us directly to account in our response as an international community. If this becomes, as many are predicting, a true genocide, we will not be able to say, as we did in the case of the Holocaust of the 1940s, or Rwanda in the 1990s, that we did not see or did not know its true scale until afterwards. Photography is showing us, in effect, the present and the future at the same time.
Jennifer Good’s recommended reading:
The Plague: Living Death in Our Times — Jacqueline Rose
The Civil Contract of Photography — Ariella Azoulay
A huge thanks to Jennifer Good, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:
Alice, thank you very much for this conversation which directly tackles a subject I've been thinking about a lot as I view the images from Gaza. I'll be sharing the link with a number of people.
Another great article and interview, Alice. Particularly appreciate the recommended reading and links in the text. I recently worked my way through your summer reading list and each one was a gem. Thanks again!