What responsibilities does the act of seeing entail? Is the viewing of violence an indefensible form of collaboration with it? Is the refusal to view violence an indefensible form of denial? But the question gains urgency in our age of unfiltered immediacy - of the 24-hour news cycle, of Instagram and Twitter, of jihadi beheading videos, of fake news and conspiracy theorists and of repellent sites like BestGore, which revel in sadistic carnage. The question of how much violence we should see, and to what end, is almost as old as photography itself. And the world did: The photograph of Till taken by Jet magazine was reproduced throughout the country and abroad and helped invigorate the civil rights movement. His mother had insisted on an open casket: Let the world - make the world - see what her son’s tormentors had done. Johnson called this an “Emmett Till moment,” alluding to a photograph of the 14-year-old Black boy who was tortured and murdered by white racists in Mississippi in 1955. On social media and in the press, some, including the former homeland security chief Jeh Johnson, have suggested that photographs of the slaughtered children, whose faces and bodies were apparently mutilated beyond recognition, be released to the public in hopes of garnering support for gun control legislation. These are questions that are being raised in the wake of last week’s mass shooting of 19 children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, which has plunged much of the country into an abyss of sorrow, rage and despair. What does the destruction of a human being, of a human body - frail and vulnerable (all human bodies are frail and vulnerable) - look like? What can we know of another’s suffering? Is such knowledge forbidden - or, alternately, necessary? And if we obtain it, what then? Photographic images can bring us close to the experience of suffering - and, in particular, to the physical torment that violence creates - in ways that words do not. While some charge that viewing such pictures is voyeuristic, these images made me face the terror, the blood and the sheer cruelty of this practice - one that, astonishingly, has not yet been tossed into the dustbin of history.
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But I never understood just what it entails - the slow, cruel process by which a defenseless human being is degraded and destroyed - until I saw a series of photographs taken by Somali photojournalist Farah Abdi Warsameh, which depict the stoning execution of a man accused of adultery by the insurgent group Hizbul Islam. I know that stoning people to death is barbaric.