Em

Nonstop imagery (television, streaming video, movies) is our surround, but when it comes to remembering, the photograph has the deeper bite. Memory freeze-frames; its basic unit is the single image. In an era of information overload, the photograph provides a quick way of apprehending something and a compact form for memorizing it. The photograph is like a quotation, or a maxim or proverb. Each of us mentally stocks hundreds of photographs, subject to instant recall.

photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric.

The photographs are a means of making “real” (or “more real”) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore.