Why are these people looking at me?

For a long time, editors often shied away from images of the poor and marginalized people looking directly into the camera lens. Editors chided photographers for making “portraits of strangers,” when there was direct eye contact was made between the subject and the photographer. The rationale? Eye-to-eye images make viewers uncomfortable and are too personal for mass audiences.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s photographers were encouraged to make images that reflected objectivity by not being noticed.  Although this preference may no longer be the case, there is still the consideration that appearance reflects reality.

The idea that a photographer could be inconspicuousness, like a fly on the wall, lent itself to the notion that an impartial observer would have no real influence over the scene being portrayed. Over the past decades, a relentless stream news images showing starving children has assaulted Western consciousness, yet poverty, starvation and disease continue. The so-call developed world has seen countless pictures of starving babies staring into the lens of a camera, yet remain we estranged from reality.

Cultural theorist Guy Debord observes that the spectacle can be thought of as an objectified vision of the world – a vision where people become alienated from each other and the things they produce.  Albeit obtuse, Debord’s criticism of modernity is reflected, unintentionally, in the visual routines and practices of today’s media. Today’s media, often with the help of public relations experts, seek to simplify political, economic and moral complexity through sound bites and photo ops. Photographers make pictures with the expectation that audiences will come to perceive what is presented as something of a truth.

Debord notes:

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.

There are rhetorical distinctions presented in various types of news photographs. There are subtle nuisances between looking at and being looked at. Looking into the eyes of stranger invites us read a personal narrative that may be alienating. The eyes, like a child staring into the camera in a “Save the Children” poster pleads with us to take action—to give money. In these images, there is far less ambiguity compared to pictures that have a subject looking away.

The eyes also suggest a relationship between the photographer and subject  – one that may lead viewers to interpret the image differently. More importantly, pictures suggesting the appearance of a pose do not activate the viewer’s attention in the same way as images of people in action. In this way, with the subject looking off camera, the viewer is not confronted with having to interact directly.  Anytime a subject, especially the poor and marginalized from the so-called Third World, appears in a U.S. publication, a sort of déjà vu occurs. We have become increasingly detached and anesthetized from much of the wider world because the pictures simply say, over and over again, “been there, done that.”

To test the idea that eye contact in a picture has a distinct rhetorical function compared to images that have no eye contact, I turn to my own work from the 1980s in Central America.

There are two images I will analyze here: one depicts a female rebel soldier sitting on a bench after a patrol, while the other shows an elderly woman staring into the lens of the camera. In the former, the woman is looking away from the camera.

I assume that one way of measuring a picture’s emotional and intellectual appeal is through various feelings of immediacy, intensity and intimacy.

Not all images can be characterized has having all three elements of appeal, and it appears that in this case both present immediately and with a degree of intensity, they fail to be equally intimate.

Although interpretations remain the unique province of each viewer, it appears that focal point, as well as eye contact contribute to levels of intimacy in the frame.  I am drawn to the withered face and blank stare of the woman looking into the lens more than the picture of the female combatant. Although curiously intrigued by the latter image, I find the former more intimate. In a sense, I could argue that the first image is more persuasive in that it holds my emotional attention longer than the second.