My dad was an amateur photographer during apartheid in South Africa, studying film and media in Cape Town. Cleaning out the shed over Easter, we came across a box of his old photographs: black and white reels of apathetic-looking children in improvised ‘coloured’ schoolrooms, conflicts thrown across suburban streets in Mpumalanga, flashed with broken glass and violence, boys he played street football with after school suddenly picked up and carted to jail for being out after curfew. Born in South Africa during the somewhat awkward rebirth of The Rainbow Nation, I grew up on stories of the apartheid, gleaned from ‘adult’ conversations I wasn’t supposed to hear and more tentatively breached as I grew older.

But how do you picture such a thing in all its depth and complexity? How do you feel more than fleeting impassioned outrage, revert from the inevitably resumed everyday apathy, when you weren’t there and it didn’t happen to you? How do – should – I obligate my conscience to the racially based conflict(s) that wrote so much of the history of the nation of my birth? I don’t know. But seeing those pictures encouraged a response beyond baseless apathy, activated it to such intrigue, stressing the implicit potential of photography as a medium to traverse spatial and temporal divides separating ‘Us’ from ‘Them’, ‘My Reality’ from ‘That’.

Picturing the pain of others – spectating, consuming, appropriating, conflict and war – is an almost unavoidable hallmark of modern life, facilitated by the background noise of media in all its facets. Newspapers smear their front pages with blown-up images of some conflict, Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines saturate with links and accompanying images of another conflict and charity campaigns, protests and movements spread images of other conflicts across billboards, bus stop shelters, magazines, television screens and other such pervasive platforms. Unavoidable: physically, but also psychosocially. And that’s the point.

Pre-dating the invention of cameras in 1839, pictures have long memorialised war and conflict, bearing witness for those who were, and perhaps more importantly, were not, there. Painted in c.1438, Uccello’s three panels of The Battle of San Romano pictures the conflict between Florentine and Sienese forces in 1432, glorifying the infamously reckless figure of da Tolentino leading victorious Florentine forces in formal celebration of the conflict. By implication, the image normalises support for war. Picasso’s c.1937 work Guernica, on the contrary, pictures the suffering wrought by the bombing of Guernica by Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes at the behest of nationalists in the Spanish civil war. Considered one of the most pertinent anti-war statements to date, it hangs as a tapestry at the entrance of the UN Security Council, desperately condemning war.

The art of (re)constructing events of war and conflict for spectators came into its own with the legitimacy and urgency of photojournalism in the second world war. As photographers and viewers alike took hold of the form’s advantage over painted pictures with more hidden authorship and incontrovertible construction of war and conflict, pictures disseminated through media took on a pivotal role of normalising particular responses to war and conflict. As pictures served as evidence of Nazi atrocities across Europe, the sense of pictures as constructions was overshadowed. It is, after all, harder to dispute pictures as an objective, legitimate record when their production requires the work of a machine and the in-situ presence of a person to take them. Far from a 20th Century phenomenon, the use of pictures as unquestionable evidence is something most of us will have experienced at some point.

“Picturing the pain of others – spectating, consuming, appropriating, conflict and war – is an almost unavoidable hallmark of modern life.”

I was 4 when two hijacked planes crashed into the twin trade towers in New York. America couldn’t have been further from my reality of a suburban nursery in Johannesburg, where I coerced my cousin into ballet lessons and begged my parents for one more fizzer from the local Spar. I couldn’t have been further from the attack, in whatever dimension one might frame it, on the apparently impenetrable Land Of The Free. And yet, I have a memory of 9/11, wholly based on the now iconic images of the towers moments before, during and after the attacks, shared repetitively and urgently by the media in the minutes, days, months, years following. Activated by such pictures, this memory totally justifies American responses to 9/11. For how could one be expected to critique the War on Terror, the so-called Attack on Democracy and Freedom, in the face of such undeniably – and crucially apparently objectively – unwarranted destruction? By humanising the event, the media normalised governmental rhetoric and negated any broader context of American global hegemony to silence alternative narratives of the (ensuing) conflict. It’s arguable that the subsequent support for the War on Terror would have been impassioned if these images had not existed. Without pictures of American victimhood, would justification of the War on Terror ring so convincingly? Ignoring such questions ultimately negates any context, dismissing politics in the process.

To avoid the dismissal of politics in war and conflict, it is necessary to engage with the politics of pictures themselves. Just as Uccello and Picasso are understood as the authors of their paintings, as having constructed The Battle of San Romano and Guernica with a brush and imaginative interpretation, so the pictures of suffering disseminated through media should be understood as authored constructs. In 2002, the contraction pains of famine in Malawi encouraged warnings that “Africa [was] dying again” as the media drew on rhetoric and experience from the mistakes of Ethiopia in 1984. Embodying the now-familiar trope of suffering ‘African’ children, wide-eyed and disproportionately bloated, seemingly unavoidable in our camera-mediated understandings of conflict and war, three pictures came to represent much public response to the famine. All taken by Mike Moore, the first shows starving Malawian child Luke Piri isolated against a bare wall dressed only in pants; the second shows Piri holding an empty, chipped bowl solely containing a single spoon; and the is third Piri held by a staff member at a feeding centre. Though effective in activating urgent responses to the crisis and encouraging an outpouring of charity, these pictures humanise the social, reducing broader contexts of conflict over food insecurity and access to the paternalistic stereotype of an undeveloped, helpless ‘Them in need of Us’. Failing to see them as Moore’s interpretations assumes such an apolitical understanding of famine is incontrovertible.

David Bailey CBE: ‘Is photography art? Of course it’s fucking art’

To understand pictures as both constructs from particular points of view and tools to mediate normative agendas is not to deny their powerful potential and often unparalleled necessity. The power of images showing the shooting of Mike Brown by police in August 2014 significantly contributed to what would become the Black Lives Matter movement from protests across Ferguson. In the same vein, the widely shared and vilified image of a young Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, awash a beach in Turkey in 2015 as he made his way to Europe alongside millions of other refugees and migrants sparked international outrage at the apathetic response to the refugee crisis and Syrian conflict. The faded sustenance of activated outrage from these pictures as time and re-production distance their urgency speaks to the limited reliance one can imbue pictures with in representing war and conflict. Their power and use, however, is indisputable, even as authored points of view.

In a project collating the most influential images of all time (in their opinion), Time magazine included one of a Jewish boy surrendering in Warsaw, taken in 1943. Making the Nazi atrocities ‘real’, this picture, like so many others of war and conflict, is not subject to the complexities of reference and rhetoric that plague a lot of writing. Nor is it subject to the temporal contingencies of witnessing atrocity first-hand. Pictures are a universal language to great effect and potential. We just need to remember that language, no matter how universal, is spoken in individual styles and with particular purposes. Pictures are, after all, taken