Liam Kennedy: A picture was once worth a thousand words, but weaponised for today it’s worth many millions more

Wounded Palestinians at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. Photo: AP Photo/Abed Khaled

The photo shows a dead, blood-stained infant, dressed in a babygrow and nappy, laid on a plastic sheet, its face blurred out.

It was posted on X, formerly Twitter, on October 13 by the Israeli foreign ministry, with the comment: “We went back and forth about posting this, but we need each and every one of you to know. This happened.”

The shocking image was quickly reproduced across global news and social media, its meaning digested and contested as it surfed and then drowned in the swell of misinformation and disinformation surrounding the conflict between Israel and Hamas. As more pictures of dead children were produced and claims about the beheadings of children went viral, it became almost impossible to separate fact from fiction.

Speaking to a group of Jewish leaders at the White House on October 11, President Joe Biden said: “I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed, pictures of terrorists beheading children.” The White House later “clarified” that Biden had not seen such pictures and was basing his comments on Israeli media and government reports.

As Israeli authorities shared graphic pictures of the Hamas attack with western leaders, some strained to validate their import.

“Images are worth a thousand words. These images may be worth a million,” said US secretary of state Antony Blinken in Tel Aviv on October 12. It was a curious rhetorical effort to inflate the significance of these particular images, underlining rather than transcending the lack of belief in what we see in this divisive age.

In the mid-1970s, Susan Sontag argued that photography teaches us an “ethics of seeing,” since “photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe”. Today, that ethical imperative is compromised by the unfiltered ubiquity of images, calling into question the power of photography to move or motivate us.

From its inception in 1839 and through its evolution as a mass medium, photography was associated with veracity. In 1905, Mark Twain quipped that the Kodak camera is “the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe”.

By the turn of the 20th century, documentary imagery of what was commonly hidden from view – particularly of human suffering – became instrumental in supporting reform movements, in shaping perceptions of poverty and in reporting on violent conflicts.

​The idea of “bearing witness” as a response to human rights abuses was influentially charged by the imagery of the Holocaust that emerged at the end of World War II. With the documentation of concentration camps by photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White and George Rodger, the visual horrors became a benchmark of human destructiveness.

Before the advent of television as a mass medium, photography retained a symbolic power to focus attention and response to global events. The very mention of “the Vietnam War” readily summons mental images based on iconic photos – of a Buddhist monk burning himself to death on a Saigon street in 1963, of a South Vietnamese officer summarily shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head in 1968, of a naked girl burning from a napalm attack running down a road in rural South Vietnam in 1972.

By the end of that war in the mid-1970s, concerns were already mounting that the “society of the spectacle” – of television and consumer culture and “pseudo-events” – was eroding photographs’ affective and ethical power.

In our digital age, images are ever more promiscuous and their claims to truth more fully compromised. The rapid development of new visual technologies and media platforms – satellite television, digital imaging, the internet, smartphones – has both displaced and incorporated photography. Cameras are now part of other technologies and less time and care need to be given to the production of images.

Digital photography has transformed relations between producers and consumers of photos. More and more, defining photos of news events have been produced by amateurs using digital imagers. We are all potential war photographers now.

In the digital age, images become iconic within hours, not years. To be sure, there are moments when certain images transcend the digital flood and fix attention on a certain issue.

An example is the picture of three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi lying lifeless on a beach in Turkey in September 2015. The image spread to 20 million Twitter screens in 12 hours. ​

Such images are the exceptions, as the vast majority pass us by or we simply look away. When images are pressed into ideological service, we are more and more resistant to their truth-telling properties, readily crying “fake”.

In this digital age, we must reconsider the adage “seeing is believing” as an outdated, idealistic myth. Instead, we should consider that the converse is true: believing is seeing. We are ideologically disposed to see what we want to see and to not see what we do not want to see.

With the Israel-Palestine conflict, this disposition is especially heightened. To readily assign meaning to any image emerging is to signal a position; to not do so is to hide behind moral equivalence. No position is innocent, and so a war of images shadows the real conflict.

Different constituencies want to convince you of the veracity of certain images – “This happened”, these images are “worth a million” words – usually to convince you of the moral clarity of their position and actions. But wars do not have moral clarity, and those who assert or call for it invariably seek to silence alternative views and elide historical understanding.

In the absence of such clarity, the best we may ask for and expect is “verification”, the new buzzword of investigative news media, the means by which it discriminates between authentic and fake imagery. But our uncertainty about the role of photography in our lives runs deeper than a technological fix.

Our moral compasses are malfunctioning amid the onslaught of graphic images spilling on to the internet and social media. Will our capacities to look, understand and respond to images ever catch up with the digital deluge?​

Professor Liam Kennedy is director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at UCD