Perceiving the person

Just popping in to point any readers I have left to my post over at The Personalist Project:

News photographers know we have trouble seeing the humanity in victims of violence. It is all too easy to dehumanize the people we live alongside, let alone the dead we have never known. This is why we have the old trick of putting a child’s shoe or a teddy bear in the foreground of a picture of a war zone or scene of natural disaster. If there’s a corpse, they are photographed being held or mourned over by loved ones. Or a single, humanizing detail is photographed—a bracelet on an outflung arm, a fringe of scarf across a face. These details help us to see ourselves or our loved ones in the pictured victim. We, who wear clothing, who tuck our children in at night with their own favorite stuffed toys, who love our favorite baubles, see first ourselves before we know how to see the other. It is our knowledge of our own subjectivity that reminds us that the other is also a subject, rather than merely an object.
There’s a mercy and a ruthlessness in contextualizing the victims of violence or disaster in this way. The mercy is in sparing the already-traumatized the grotesqueness of the manner of death. In any large audience there will be those who have lost loved ones to violence, and who will see in any graphic depiction only their own loved one’s pain and the cruelty of the world that drives some to despair.

The ruthlessness is in not allowing the rest of us to gain the distance of disgust…

Read the rest here.