We Need to Look at the Image

Photographs taken by journalists Noel Celis, Dondi Tawatao and Raffy Lerma | Note: The following images were used solely to help illustrate the points discussed in this story.

WE ARE in a state of war.

When the strongman declared the enemies are in its own backyard, we started to hear stories of how gunshots pierced the neighbor’s forehead, pointblank. Sometimes, we even hear the gunshots. We count every bang with our fingers. But police say we don’t know how to count properly. The next day, a .38-cal. revolver is found on the neighbor’s right hand. But he’s left-handed, his wife says. He was a good father. He couldn’t even afford a gun. Never mind, you were told. Men who were on the wrong side of the war are always victims of their own bullets.

Every day, we hear stories like this being passed on people’s tongues like an ancient tale. And just like old tales, versions vary. Sometimes, we even forget the characters, and soon what is left are generic stories with generic names and generic endings.

We follow the body count. Since the strongman assumed power, 564 suspected drug dealers or pushers have lost their lives in “legitimate” police operations and vigilante killings. We read their names and aliases like a classroom roll call. Some have remained unidentified.

So this is indeed a state of war: The dead has no face; the enemies are also the victims.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer’s front page for July 24, 2016, featured photo of a dead Michael Siaron, cradled by his spouse, Jennelyn Olaires on its wallpaper. The broadsheet, notable for featuring only positive stories on the front page of its Sunday edition, became a trending topic in the internet. The photo, which was accused of being fabricated, was taken by award-winning photojournalist Raffy Lerma. | Inquirer

Too repetitive was the story that when a national daily dropped an image of a weeping widow in the middle of the streets holding his dead husband, a pedicab driver and alleged drug pusher slain by motorcycle-riding gunmen, we were suddenly forced to look at the face of death. And death is empathy, fear and anger all at once.

The dead man, Michael Siaron, is not like you — a healthy individual in the living room casually reading this piece on a modern gadget. He was a poor man, 29, a father and a husband. Every day he used to earn the same amount you spend for lunch. He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — the sort of excuse we make for lack of logical explanation.

It was pure theater, the President quipped. Like “Mother Mary cradling the dead cadaver of Jesus Christ,” he said the photo elicits drama that clouts people’s judgment of who the bad guys are. But what the war leader failed to see is that the moment he discounted people’s subjective feelings toward the image, he has distorted the national soul.

However different our education and beliefs, we are free to feel the same horror and disgust over upsetting images as a people. Robbing us of that freedom is an abolition of humanity.

History will tell us that no war has ended with the same violence used to perpetuate it. The heart-wrenching image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the nine-year-old Vietnamese child shown running naked with severe burns on her back on the South Vietnamese town of Trang Bang is an example.

On June 8, 1972, Kim Phuc and her family have joined a group of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers to flee from North Vietnamese forces who have occupied their town. But a South Vietnamese pilot mistook the group as the enemy and dropped a Napalm bomb, killing two of Kim Phuc’s cousins and two others. Kim Phuc acquired burns too severe many thought she wouldn’t survive.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph has exposed the horrors of war and has shaken the world into thinking if senseless violence would amount to anything more than lost lives.

Kim Phuc (third child from left) in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken by the Associated Press’ Nick Ut during the Vietnam War.

By ridiculing the public’s lamentation over images of violence — regardless if the victim is an “enemy” or an “ally” — the President has forgotten that a war is truly won not by a culture of fear but a culture of understanding, the same way a climate of violence will never be equal to a climate of safety.

This is not a moral perspective, but a logical one if we are to truly start asking ourselves for whom this so-called war is being fought. We do not tag an enemy by simply looking at a list, a name, a number, a scar or color of one’s hair. That is why we need to continue looking at the image of violence.

Looking is politics. Looking is a shared experience. Looking is being human.

We look at the images of dead bodies of people we don’t know with the same open heart not only to become sympathizers, but to remind ourselves of the reality the privileged and comfortable choose to ignore.

Virginia Woolf’s reflection on war is fitting: “Not to be pained by these pictures, not to recoil from them, not to strive to abolish what causes this havoc, this carnage — these would be the reactions of a moral monster. But we are not monsters, we members of the educated class. Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.”

Because photographs can be falsified by their captions — in this case, a piece of cardboard thrown beside a dead body — we need to look at the images for ourselves to distinguish the actual moment of reality to the interpretation of that reality. That’s where humanity comes in: our capacity to judge for ourselves, to be disturbed, to be offended. Only when the viewer’s sensibility becomes assaulted will he find the urge to deplore an injustice.

As Susan Sontag argued, we all have our own distance from war, but image closes the gap. But, she said, it is always the image that someone chose. “To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” We look at the image because we need to see what isn’t there. We need to look for the missing piece.

When you gaze into the abyss, do not be afraid that the abyss will gaze back at you. The abyss is not a safe place. And so is where you’re standing.