Quote//Between the Eyes / Dvid Levi Strauss

It is partly the politics of images , the way they are organized , has changed, and this has acted to erode their effectiveness, and their power to elicit action. .... But there has always been something about "real pictures" of real violence that undercuts their political effect, and separates them from experience.

Roland Barthes addressed this lack of effect. "It is not enough for the photographer to signify the horrible for us to experience it," he wrote. These images, intended to convey horror, fail to do so "because , as we look at them , we are in each dispossessed of our judgement: someone has shuddered for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing- except a simle right of intellectual acquiescence... "
Such images do not compel us to action, but to acceptance. The action has already been taken , and we are not implicated. Our complicity is concealed, intact. "The perfect legibility of the scene, its formulation, dispenses us from receiving the image in all its scandal; reduced to the state of pure language , the photograph does not disorganize us; We are not disorganized because news images operate within a perfectly organized rhetoric of consumption, the pure language of the spectatorship under which we now live. Images of suffering and misery elsewhere in the world are used as reminders of what we are free from. They operate in the greater image environment of consumption to offset images of contentment, to provide the necessary contrast. Their use value, and their effect, is palliative. This effect is far-reaching and one of the histories thus buried was that of Rwanda.

A SEA OF GRIEFS IS NOT A PROSCENIUM/ P81-82