The Empathic Power of Images: Civil Rights, Vietnam and Today

Photos that I vividly recall making an impression on me include 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford being viciously taunted by a young white girl as she attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957. And I will never forget the faces of the four little girls killed in the terrorist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama or those of three young civil rights workers killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964. As a 17-year-old, my earliest memory of Vietnam was the self-immolation of Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, on a busy Saigon street in 1963. I can still recall his dignified stillness as the flames enveloped him. Because he was protesting against the U.S.-backed Diem dictatorship I began to question the official story about Vietnam.

But that was another era. Today the limitations placed on exposure to powerful images that might stir our deepest emotions would impress a modern day Dr. Goebbels. We know that photographers are banned from the Iraqi battle zone while too many others are pressured into self-censorship. The Pentagon forbids media coverage of the remains of soldiers departing Ramstein Air Base in Germany or coffins returning to Dover, Delaware. Landstule regional medical center in Germany, which routinely receives horribly maimed soldiers from Iraq is off-limits for photos and reporters are closely monitored by military escorts. An acquaintance of mine volunteers as a counselor at the center and recently told me the heartbreaking story of trying to comfort a blind quadruple amputee, the victim of a roadside bombing in Iraq. I went away with the impression that if a photo journalist could document her daily rounds, the public wouldn’t tolerate another day of U.S. occupation.

I would argue that the tremendous amount of deception and fraud expended by U.S. elites on behalf of dampening or denying opportunities for empathic engagement is based on a real fear of the public. This is compelling testimony on behalf of the subversive power of images, not so unlike exposing the unconscionable reality of the Atlantic slave trade. One lesson may be that in resisting 21st Century human trafficking, wage slavery, and empire, we shouldn’t shy away from visual appeals. If anything, we need to be more creative in obtaining the public’s eye and heart.