Photosensitivity: Self-Immolation, Photography and the Incendiary Image Part II
Society of the Spectacle
In Part I, we learned the Buddhist perspective on suffering as a catalyst for awakening and enlightenment. We also learned of how a bodhisattva takes on the suffering of others and sacrifices himself for the enlightenment of others. Thich Nhat Hanh explains how self-burning is not suicide for suicide is an act of despair whereas Thich Quang Duc’s immolation was intended to awaken the world to the suffering of Buddhists with courage and hope aspiring toward a better future. In the case of self-immolation, which can be called a speech act that says more than words ever could, this enlightenment is quite literal. The Buddhist monks took on the suffering of the people to raise awareness about the injustices and atrocities of the American-backed Diem government. There is an interesting parallel between the Buddhist monks trying to awaken their own people and the world to the injustices of the minority ruled government and American war correspondents during the Vietnam War who also used put themselves in harm’s way and used light in the sense of photography to capture the reality of the war for their own people whose own government was lying to them.
This example of self-immolation, a very literal example, is tied to the larger issue of the incendiary image. Images that shock, startle, provoke, awaken, expose to the light, demand action and reparation. Do incendiary images work? Does their impact last? What does it say about society that people need to be shocked and horrified and exposed and shamed into changing something? With images being so widespread through mass media and especially now with the internet, have images including images of suffering lost their power? Is the awakening and love and compassion that the Buddhist perspective on self-sacrifice and suffering speaks of possible if people are primarily living and experiencing the world through a screen as spectators?
Let’s put those questions to the side for a moment and examine two useful texts in understanding photographs of suffering in general.
In her famous book Regarding The Pain Of Others, Susan Sontag writes about the effects of the experience of the suffering of people far away through mass media by people in modern, capitalist societies. Sontag explains:
Awareness of the suffering that accumulates in a select number of wars happening elsewhere is something constructed. Principally in the form that is registered by cameras, it flares up, is shared by many people, and fades from view. (Susan Sontag, Regarding The Pain Of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 20.
Interesting use of the phrase ‘flares up’. The phenomenon of the incendiary image seems to be associated with and indeed made possible by mass media, a spark that spreads like wild fire. It is also a phenomenon of the commodification of images. Incendiary images capture attention and sell well. Shock value becomes its commercial value.
Sontag observes how the Vietnam War in particular, which was the first to be televised, “introduced the home front to new tele-intimacy with death and destruction. Ever since, battles and massacres filmed as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment” (Ibid. 21). She also gives the example of people describing 9/11 like a movie. The proliferation of images makes it so that our first experience of something is not or will not be a direct, unadulterated experience “in real life” but the experience of an image, a representation of the that thing. This is particularly dangerous if we are talking about suffering. Interacting with the image of suffering is different than interacting with actual suffering or experiencing actual suffering. When you’re interacting with an image of suffering, it puts you in a passive state, a spectator state. You might feel shock or horror or perhaps even a gory curiosity or poignancy. But it is very one sided and selfish/solipsistic even if one feels care and sadness for the people suffering in the image. An image doesn’t require anything of you. You feel shock or sadness and then you can look away. But if this is our primary interaction with suffering, we become spectators, avoidants, cowards, armchair activists when the suffering is right in front of us calling on us to do something. The commodification of images of suffering is also a commodification of suffering. The irony is that the media intended to bring the suffering of faraway places closer to us and to our awareness ends up distancing it from us and subsequently alienating us from the suffering and the decisions made by our governments in our name.
The photographer John Berger articulates this alienation in his essay “Photographs of Agony”. He observes the effect of such photographs as follows:
They bring us up short. The most literal adjective that could be applied to them is arresting. We are seized by them. (I am aware that there are people who pass them over, but about them there is nothing to say). As we look at them, the moment of the other’s suffering engulfs us. We are filled with either despair or indignation. Despair takes on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose. Indignation demands action. We try to emerge from the moment of the photograph back into our lives. As we do so, the contrast is such that the resumption of our lives appears to be hopelessly inadequate response to what we have just seen. (John Berger, “Photographs of Agony”, Selected Essays, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001), 280.)
Berger observes the isolated and isolating nature of, not only photographs of agony, but the very moments of agony. Moments of agony, he argues,..
whether photographed or not, are discontinuous with all other moments. They exist by themselves. But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy. and as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed; his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war. (Ibid. 281)
According to Berger, the proper response would be to confront one’s own lack of political freedom through the confrontation with the photograph. However, what Berger calls the double violence of the photographed moment impedes this realization. Here is how Berger explains the double violent of the photographed moment:
The camera which isolates a moment of agony isolates no more violently than the experience of that moment isolates itself. The word trigger, applied to rifle and camera, reflects a correspondence which does not stop at the purely mechanical. The image seized by the camera is doubly violent and both violences reinforce the same contrast: the contrast between the photographed moment and all others. (Ibid. 280)
It seems Berger is saying that the moment of agony isolates the sufferer due to the nature of suffering and due to the discontinuity of such moments with what came before and what will come after. Seeing suffering and then taking a picture further isolates this moment. Not to mention the feeble ugliness and utter lack of compassion involved in seeing someone suffering or in trouble and taking a picture of it as the new phenomenon of digital bystanders do. War photographers might be excused under the premise that they can’t do anything to stop the suffering of the person so the next best thing is to document it and raise awareness.
What we don’t want is for suffering to turn into a spectacle. Sontag and Berger are both describing how images of suffering in modern society actually distance, alienate, numb, and make us feel more powerless and perhaps eventually indifferent. Thich Quang Duc’s intention in immolating and the enlightenment through suffering and the love and compassion was in a way lost in translation. The American journalist who took the picture himself saw it as a kind of political theater, which is unfair. It’s also quite a contrast to compare Thich Quang Duc’s immolation with the immolation of Tibetans protesting China or the Tunisian whose immolation became a catalyst for the Arab Spring. In the latter examples, the people who immolate are causing as much disruption and provocation as possible, running through crowds while on fire. That is not to deny or diminish their pain and commitment to their cause in any way. But it does turn it into more of a spectacle than the control exhibited by a Buddhist monk in the lotus position.
Suffering can lead us to turn away, switch off, fall into despair. Or suffering can awaken us, deliver us from ignorance, show us where our work lies, engender more love and compassion, more light and warmth as those old ways of being and thinking are burned away. Indeed, Thich Nhat Hanh’s other books talk about being with our own suffering and the suffering of others as though it were a weeping child asking for our attention instead of numbing or avoiding. He says when we know how to suffer, we suffer less. We have all had the experience of feeling helpless and not knowing what to do or say in the presence of someone crying or we have been the person crying in pain and disappointed by people who did nothing. We could start by taking a page from Buddhism and being mindful and present with ourselves and others as we suffer and making them and ourselves feel accepted instead of being a spectator of suffering. Perhaps if we start doing that with ourselves and the people we know, we won’t be living in societies where people have to immolate themselves to be seen and heard.
