Image Crash
The table seems too big to capture in a single photograph. In the foreground we see the details: empty plates and goblets, uniform napkins, loaves of challah, some fruit, bouquets of flowers, a white tablecloth, and one vacant chair after another. A woman glances at her phone as she walks by; her shadow — the scene on the sidewalk is either dusk or dawn — walks alongside her. Farther back, people mill about a plaza. Meanwhile, the table repeats itself, murkier and murkier until it disappears in the shadows. In Tel Aviv, these 203 place settings marked “each hostage believed to be in Gaza,” according to the New York Times, who published this photograph on its front page on October 21, 2023. The loss, we are meant to understand, can scarcely be represented.
I cut this photo from the paper because I found it craven, perverse. Its subject — emptiness, vacancy — is a common media narrative: something was here, now it’s not. In Image Control, I wrote about this in relation to the pandemic — all those pictures of deserted streets and ransacked shelves. What we saw was that our way of life had been taken from us. When this photograph appeared, two weeks after Hamas slaughtered over a thousand people, Israel had already retaliated fivefold, sixfold1; yet the rhetoric2 here — and photographs do acquire rhetoric when published in specific places, at specific times, and with specific captions — implies that justice will be served, that Israel’s way of life must return to some semblance of normalcy. As I write this, ten months into what several newspapers continue to call a “war” in Gaza, Al Jazeera estimates that Israel has murdered over 40,000 Palestinians, including 15,000 children, and injured more than 90,000.
An essay like this is far too short to enumerate the various omissions, vocabularies, and juxtapositions that reveal this particular paper’s corporate policy on Israel. But during a time of violence and conflict, a single photograph of an empty table set for a feast on the cover of the nation’s premier newspaper announces a value shift in our most globalized currency — images themselves.
In The Center Will Not Hold, Griffin Dunne’s laudatory documentary about his aunt, Joan Didion, Dunne mentions the five-year-old girl in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” whose mother has given her LSD. What did she think, Dunne asks, when she walked into that room? Didion doesn’t hesitate: “Gold.” While “Bethlehem” is an essay, not a photograph, it’s the image of it — a kindergartner on acid — that Didion knew was immensely valuable. It was this image that carried the essay’s rhetoric.
In Gaza, children are mutilated and dismembered. Mothers are crushed beneath stones. We know this because there are photographs and videos of these atrocities; you can find them disturbingly easily on social media — and often they find you whether you want them or not. But the New York Times does not seem to value these images, no matter how many of them there are, no matter how horrific they are3. Every day there are dozens and dozens of photographs that “represent” the horror in Gaza, that “stand for” the genocide in Palestine the way that Phan Thị Kim Phúc’s face, contorted in terror and in pain and published on the cover of the New York Times in June of 1972, “stood for” American intervention in Vietnam. If images are currency, Israel’s brutality in Gaza has brought the market to a crash: There is no gold to be found among all this suffering because those who are suffering are meant, this story goes, to suffer.
Photography’s revolution was not technological but social. In The Civil Imagination, Ariella Azoulay traces this “new kind of gaze.” By turning disparate subjects into formally identical objects, photography altered “the way in which people viewed themselves and those around them,” as well as “the situations in which they found themselves and within which they acted on the world.” This shift in technology, she writes, enabled these relationships to become
objects of an analytical gaze, one that compared, categorized, organized, interpreted… The new technology of photography was revolutionary to the extent that it created a common and homogenous platform of use, which people mobilized simultaneously, without advance planning or coordination, in order to transform an unprecedented plethora of objects into images, visual material.
Sontag, of course, wrote about the surrealist origins of photography — its “dis-relation” of subjects by turning them into objects. While the currency metaphor is certainly there in the way newspapers and magazines and television programs bought and disseminated certain images, including images of suffering but also images of celebrity, it isn’t until the widespread use of social media that we see just how total the image market really is. As I argued in Image Control, social media coerces its users to present themselves and consume their peers as images; we spend one another and trade one another as though shareholders and stock simultaneously; and, in a powerfully networked society, this process is a necessary precursor for fascist division. It’s much easier to throw away an object than a human being.
The history of human rights is, in part, the history of photography by way of journalism. Earlier this year, Aryeh Neier, a cofounder of Human Rights Watch, asked the readers of the New York Review of Books “Is Israel Committing Genocide?” ( his answer, though initially skeptical, was yes). To introduce this claim, Neier provided a brief history of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), the modern development of which was “aided by the invention of the telegraph, which made it possible for newspapers to employ war correspondents who reported on the conduct of military forces at battles were underway. When those forces engaged in cruel practices, that information was widely disseminated.” Throughout most of the twentieth century, these organizations — notably the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) — operated rather clandestinely. “The principal effort to promote compliance,” Neier writes, meant
persuad[ing] military commanders and top government officials to conduct military operations in accordance with its principles. The ICRC did not publicize its efforts, in large part because it prized its ability to obtain access to prisoners of war and other security detainees so as to provide them with protection. The organization believed it would lose such access if it publicized its interactions with military officials.
One of the goals of Human Rights Watch, Neier says, was to “complement the confidential work of the ICRC by engaging in publicized efforts to obtain compliance with the provisions of IHL in circumstances of armed conflict. Over time other human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, followed suit.” Becoming, via media coverage, a matter of public debate “reflected the growing strength and capacity of the human rights movement” as well as “helped to establish the context in which a conflict such as the war in Gaza is being judged by concerned members of the public worldwide.” We are watching: this is the operative mood of IHL.
While “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity” — adjudicated by the ICC and the ICJ — are tenuous, if not flimsy, legal designations (especially while leaders from African, Asian, and South American countries face consequences while those from Russia, China, and the United States do not), this sense of surveillance, of judgment, is an important aspect of publishing the photographs of victims of political violence. Because IHL is intertwined with journalism, this cultivation of judgment is inseparable from the mainstream media’s coverage of Gaza — including portrayals of suffering deemed to have value.
I say mainstream media because the value of an image is further threatened by another aspect of modern technology: generative algorithms marketed as “artificial intelligence.” The deployment of these algorithms has lent further credence to the right-wing position on all facts, which is to deny them. The facts are false, we are told. The image is fabricated. The suffering shown is not real. This has been an Israeli tactic for decades, as Chomsky covers extensively in Fateful Triangle — his analysis of the “special relationship” between the United States and Israel — but now “AI” democratizes this technology of discredit; anyone can post a computer-generated image of Palestinian suffering, bait it into going viral, and then denounce its fiction as a way to discredit testimony itself. What’s worse, this has a chilling effect: without the expertise or time to verify an image, it’s best not to share it or repost it or further disseminate it. If images are currency, Silicon Valley has institutionalized counterfeiting, and the surrealistic equivalence of social media means that any image we encounter there might be a counterfeit.
The idea of the “counterfeit,” of course, has long held sway over politics, including something as mundane as the position of a cow skull photographed by Arthur Rothstein in 1936. Employed by Roosevelt’s Resettlement Administration, Rothstein had been sent to the Dakotas to publicize rural poverty and generate public sympathy (and therefore consent for funding). Almost immediately, according to scholar Cara Finnegan, a conservative newspaper in Fargo criticized Rothstein’s use of the skull in relation to the farm he’d been sent to photograph, “argu[ing] that photographers and journalists were using manipulative methods to make Americans think the drought in the Dakotas was worse than it was.” My point about algorithms and social media is a question of scale, or of ease. If anyone can fabricate an image with the click of a button, there will be far more fabricated images. And with more fabricated images, there are exponentially more contested images, whether real or not.
While individual social media users have little control over what they see or where it comes from, mainstream media still has the resources and expertise to identify and reject the counterfeits — and these organizations, more than anyone else, are empowered to cultivate the public’s judgment of atrocity. For the New York Times, this position of influence carries an enormous responsibility: to show us who is suffering and why, and how our own actions are related to this suffering. Instead, we see loaves of uneaten bread on a tidily set table, with no mention of the wall not 50 miles away, on the other side of which are two million people intentionally deprived of food.
To have to write, as everyone writing about Gaza must write, the phrase “as I write this”: this is to know those 40,000 deaths will become 50,000, then sixty, then seventy and more. Israel’s campaign in Gaza is bottomless because it isn’t about justice, or even revenge. It’s about opportunity — the exact reason Netanyahu cultivates an extremist opposition. Terror is government by proxy, or what Jacques Rancière might call the coercion of consensus: establishing and radicalizing a dis-credible resistance to bolster your own policies as the clear choice. Security and control, in a democracy threatened by terrorism, become financial and political priorities; meanwhile, liberties and social programs are rescinded luxuries. Hamas took political control of Gaza after years of funding and training by Israeli intelligence — an intentional radicalization of Islamist resistance meant to discredit and disband Yasser Arafat’s secular PLO. If the alternative to Israeli control is fundamentalist anti-semitism, the choice, Israel gets to tell the world, is clear.
Because this topic is so willfully misunderstood, I want to interject here and say that none of the Israelis murdered or kidnapped on October 7 deserved this kind of violence. As with the destruction of the World Trade Center or the murder of American settlers in the western territories of this country in the nineteenth century — both of which are, in their own way, analogous to Israel’s historical position in the Middle East — to understand why violence happens is not to condone it. But just as September 11, with this country’s sociopolitical history (including training and arming Al Qaeda), can scarcely be called a “tragedy,” it’s absurd to consider the actions of Hamas, however contemptible, as anything other than a logical result of Israeli apartheid. The fact is, Netanyahu is responsible for those Israeli deaths, just as he is responsible for his government’s genocidal policies. As Kenneth Roth wrote recently, the international conventions are very clear: a war crime does not justify a retaliatory war crime. No one with a shred of sense or credibility is defending Hamas, but to hold Palestinian civilians responsible for what amounts to a fundamentalist dictatorship — again, installed by Israeli intelligence — is to use terrorism as a political strategy to annex what remains of Palestine. By rejecting any move toward self-governance in Gaza, even if Hamas were to be eradicated, Netanyahu has all but said this himself.
Without terrorism, the ludicrous and idiotic policies of neoliberal democracy are obvious; this is why many governments worldwide continue to foment terrorist opposition — and by extension manufacture our consent to be ruled as subjects, not as citizens. This is why a major neoliberal newspaper would publish, instead of a photograph of an injured child (as it did with Assad’s strike against civilians in Syria in 2016, or even with an Israeli strike against Gaza in 2014), a photograph of emptiness — of a “threatened way of life.” Anyone, the photograph says, can be taken from these comforts and norms as long as terrorism exist. The war against terror, the story goes, must continue, no matter the cost to Palestinian lives. This is not the cultivation of judgment, but its mutilation — a tactic that cedes the very concept of society to the market values of social media.
Because images are so cravenly deployed as currency, the kind of collapse suggested by recent editorial decisions in mainstream media — in what images of suffering are “worth” — is a human rights catastrophe that will not end with Gaza. At the same time, that the value or market for images like these can collapse proves how precarious it is to see ourselves and our contemporaries as images, to consume one another as images. As Canetti wrote in Crowds and Power: “Inflation is a crowd phenomenon… What is it that happens in an inflation? The unit of money suddenly loses its identity.” To stake one’s life or personality on an individuated brand is to risk this existential bankruptcy. “Money,” Canetti writes, “can be devalued downwards to any depth.” To know that our market can crash is to know just how easily any human life can become worthless; and who, at that point, will judge with compassion and fairness what’s happened to us?
As with any data related to Palestine, the facts are politicized and disputed. In addition, casualties are difficult to count in Gaza because most victims end up buried in rubble.
Part of this rhetoric — that 203 Israelis won’t be sitting down to dinner — is obscene given Israel’s deliberate starvation of civilians in Gaza.
Nor is this absence, after October 7, a racialized phenomenon, as Sarah Sentilles has described with respect to other violent conflicts. Most American media organizations will hesitate to show injured or dead white people, but will readily display injured or dead people of color.