John Taylor
Manchester University Press, £15.99, pp 210
ISBN 0 7190 3722 0
The thing about looking at photographs is that we have a choice of whether to engage with the event depicted or not. We may have little concept of what preceded the picture being taken or what happened immediately afterwards, but we can look with utter detachment or we can get involved. Much of Body Horror discusses the apparent sanitisation of war and other traumatic situations by the media’s adoption of policies designed more to protect the viewer than to portray reality. Yet, for a book about photography, there are frustratingly few pictures included, and, although the subject matter is fascinating, it not an easy read.
Throughout the book Taylor suggests that we are likely to be minimising the atrocities of war and disaster by allowing only ethically acceptable photographs to be published, and that we would be more appropriately shocked out of complacency if starker images were splashed across our newspapers. He argues that other nations’ wars and famines could become more our own if we had to face death and destruction rather than the more visually acceptable—but less shocking—alternatives that have come to replace them. Emotive they may be, but better this than bland anaesthesia which sedates and numbs our senses. On the other side of the debate, however, there are those who argue strongly that the persistent use of shocking pictures can induce an analgesic effect and “compassion fatigue,” such that the desired acknowledgement of horror is replaced by “It’s only a photograph.”
Taylor quotes Martin Bell, the former BBC reporter: “In a world where genocide has returned in recent years to haunt three continents, we should remind ourselves that this crime against humanity requires accomplices—not only the hatred that makes it happen, but the indifference that lets it happen.” It is this indifference and lack of imagination that Taylor and others suggest can come from an inappropriate use of photography. As another critic says, “If we cannot imagine torture, we cannot stop it.”
In chapter 3 Taylor himself adopts an interesting policy of journalistic self censorship in an effort to reduce gratuitously repulsive material. Rather than printing the actual pictures, he uses words to describe a series of photographs that depict a particularly gruesome execution. But by adopting this method, he ironically creates a far more vivid picture than I suspect the original photographs would have done. I felt physically sickened by his choice of words because they told the story of the execution from start to finish, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination. Publishing the photographs alongside the text may have drawn me in, but printing them on their own—suspended in midair without text—would almost certainly have been less powerful.
Footnotes
Rating: ★★