THIS documentary had me passing my tissue packet around the movie theatre and hugging strangers when it was over.
In a course I took last semester, there was an assignment to read/watch/view a selection of poetry and visual art and then to either find or create an image that is your response to the one of the selected pieces. The image I chose as my response to one of the poems was an image from the Vietnam War, and when it was my turn to share, the instructor went off on this whole lecture about the ethical implications of war imagery, and how we have to be careful not to provoke our audiences into discomfort. I told him I wasn’t all that concerned with making audiences comfortable - especially when it’s my own personal response to another piece of art, that not all provocation is inappropriate, and bearing witness is a radical act of alliance and a powerful way to care for each other. (I can be a real treat to have in class.)
I don’t think what he had to say was total bunk, because it is important when creating visual narratives that you do your best to communicate in ways that people can understand, and I do agree that photojournalism can have some tricky ethics to navigate, so I don’t want to vilify this guy - he was a great teacher and I’d absolutely recommend his course - but his focus in that moment was more about preparing students to be as palatable as possible to as wide an audience as possible, and mine was about bearing witness to deep atrocity as a radical and political act of care.