Making Connections with Pictures: Are traumatic events embedded in the collective conscious?

An abandoned boy sniffs glue near the central cathedral in San Salvador, El Salvador (1993).

Pictures help make sense of the past while we live in the present.

When we recall an image that conveys meaning for us, the picture will often hold a certain power over how we think and act in the world. In other words, pictures help shape or construct what we know of as reality.

It has been argued that memory is actually a form of energy. Asha Clinton (2006) in a journal article concerning transpersonal psychotherapy   suggests "The memories, cognitions, emotions, sensations, and intuitions human beings experience are themselves composed of energy."

Many of this nation's iconic imagery, from the 20th century at least, such as the flag raising on Iwo Jima, Nick Ut's picture of a young girl fleeing the bombing of her village in Vietnam, or the shooting of college students at Kent State University by National Guard troops, are images that signify traumatic events in society. These are pictures in which symbolic meaning extends beyond the actual occurrence.  If we consider the number of prizes given to pictures displaying trauma and conflict each year in professional photojournalism competitions, we may begin to realize just how insatiable our appetite is for the sensational. This is not a criticism of the value of providing people with quality on-the-spot reportage of significant events. Instead, the point here is that our culture has become numb to the suffering these images represent. In our collective conscious every image we see in today's press is compared with other images representing similar events -- war, famine, natural disasters. We are a culture continuously awash in images of violence and devastation.   

Recalling such images may rekindle for some negative feelings, while for others, pictures may hold little or no significance. Do pictures influence how we interpret and remember our world from one generation to the next?

Pictures can evoke difficult emotions and give rise to negative beliefs and fantasies. Pictures can also bring about healing. Pictures can rebuke or challenge prevailing negative attitudes as well as reinforce them. 

In this way, the power of the image is undeniable. We live with our past, because we are constantly reminded of it  through the images we care to remember.

Comments

[Hariman]

I'm among those who think it is time to move beyond the conventional wisdom that "our culture has become numb to the suffering these images represent." This isn't true and never was true. Nor, tellingly, did its original proponent, Susan Sontag, provide evidence that it was true, while she came to a grudging qualification of her own argument in her late work. David Levi Strauss provides an interesting discussion of the topic in a review in this summer's Bookforum (http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/200703/258). Straus describes the aesthetizaton-of-suffering thesis as one that began as a "trenchant critiques of documentary photography" but descended into "academic mannerism," and he puts the key question clearly: "Could it be that what were in the past necessary and substantive critiques of representation have become, in practical terms, hindrances to actually looking at images?" The review discusses two books, Beautiful Suffering: Photography and the Traffic in Pain, edited by Mark Reinhardt, Erina Duganne, and Holly Edwards, and--full disclosure--No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Louis Lucaites.