The Impulse to Share Evidence: Tensions in Representing the Unity Uprising

Images of people suffering have long been a topic of debate. Images of inflicted violence can distance, objectify, condemn, and dehumanize—or they can produce compassion and move masses to action. As cameras have become omnipresent, critics have increasingly questioned the role and effect of images of suffering, but their undeniable importance to change-making produces important tensions. As artists, how can we make work that invokes the value of life? How can we represent violence without replicating the relations of domination depicted? How can we express everything that cannot be recreated: the invisible, banal, physical, and psychological effects of loss, suffering, and violence? And are there moments when we should simply try to show things as they are? These are some of the questions I asked myself in spring 2021 as a popular uprising erupted in Palestine.

“[S]traight photography leads you to the scandal of horror, not to horror itself,” wrote Roland Barthes in 1969.¹ Three decades after her 1978 Cuesta del Plomo image of a severed body during the Nicaraguan revolution, photographer Susan Meiselas was still reflecting on whether it is even possible to “make pictures that are not spectacle for the comfortable safe lives that look at them from a distance.”² And whereas images of suffering in distant places tell the viewer that “this is the sort of thing that happens in that place,”³ images of violence nearby can tell viewers that this is the sort of thing that happens to those people. In both cases, the image distances the subject from the viewer in such a way that leaves the latter incapable of identifying with the former.

Consider, for example, the nearly constant stream of videos documenting Black victims of police violence in the United States and Canada. Despite the immense visual evidence, jury conviction rates in the US have not been impacted, and the widespread denial of anti-Black racism prevails. When images and videos depicting racial violence reach