It is interesting to reflect on how selected images influence our perspective of world events. Susan Sontag observed that "Photographs are a species of rhetoric."
The two newspaper front pages evaluated here illustrate this point. Both images are persuasive in that they hold within them the capacity for changing the viewer's attitude toward the situation in the Middle East.
In this case, The New York Daily News engages us in a form of visual hyperbole or exaggeration by putting the image forward as a rhetorical device -- a picture that frames the severity of an event for the audience. Along with this reading, however, we must also factor in the headline, "On the Brink", for the effect to become even more dramatic.
Our conditions of knowing the world are shaped by the choices others make to tell us what is happening. The editors selecting and laying out the front page, or clipping some video to include only certain frames of action. This is what editors do --they make choices that will influence us in some way.
The images we see that define events for us from conflicts in Middle East are added to our collective accounts of more than three decades of other intense and violent imagery. In a sense, haven't we seen these images, or images very much like them, before?
Sontag reminds us that images depicting violence serve as ideological benchmarks in our visual culture. Pictures can arrest our attention, make us stop and think, shock us, or make us feel something in some new ways. But pictures, if we become callous and accustomed to the violence they portray may desensitize us.
In trying to come to terms with the violence of the Middle East, the front page display of rocket attacks against Israeli may play out in the mind's of Americans in many different ways. On one level, people may be alarmed and appalled by the pictures, while on another level, the images may also desensitize us to the harsh reality they describe. The big question here is how will the images that we see of this bloodshed compel us to act? Will these images make a difference in our conduct or change our attitude in some way?
My guess is that many people, unless you are actually among those being bombed, will look at the images, pause briefly, order another cup of coffee, and flip to the sports page.