It is That Deep: Photo-Graphic Violence 

Content warning: violence

Living in a world saturated with photographs and videos of violence, death and suffering, the everyday person seems to be constantly positioned as witnesses — often without consent, preparation or choice. 

This tension between the necessity of seeing, the danger of exposure and the acceleration of surveillance technology raises urgent questions about the role photography plays in American democracy. 

“In no other form of society in history has there been such a concentration of images, such a density of virtual messages,” art critic John Berger wrote in his book “Ways of Seeing”.

Today, images don’t solely inform the public, they seem to stalk the public. They autoplay, repeat, linger — asking for attention rather than consent.

I learned this on May 25, 2020, while a video of George Floyd’s murder circled endlessly across every screen in my household, plunging me into despair. 

Every other video I skipped, I heard his pleas, saw his face on the ground and even worse — listened to the latest monotonous voice, ready to dissect his death. 

While the video was crucial in exposing state violence against marginalized communities, the constant circulation of Floyd’s final moments pushed me into a depressive episode, making awareness feel paralyzing instead of empowering. 

Yet, media like that video matter. Without visual evidence, injustice is easier to deny. Art critic Berger argues when people are prevented from seeing their history, they are robbed of something that belongs to them. 

Photography preserves truth when institutions attempt to erase it. As curator Sandra Phillips notes in her book, “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870,” photographs have the potential to be politically explosive, which is why governments and states work so hard to control them.  

For instance, CBS News Chief Bari Weiss blocked the publication of a “60 Minutes” story, documenting the conditions within El Salvador’s prisons, according to NPR.

Additionally, videos documenting the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good disrupted official narratives which framed them as aggressors.

In moments like these, photography becomes a democratic tool to demand accountability. 

However, the political necessity of images doesn’t make their circulation harmless. 

Art writer and critic Susan Sontag warns photographs both transfix and anesthetize in her collection of essays “On Photography.” Repeated exposure to suffering dulls emotional response, transforming outrage into detachment and shock into familiarity. 

In effect, the more we see, the less we feel. What once provoked action begins to blur into the background noise of everyday scrolling. 

This numbness isn’t incidental. Berger argues modern publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. Seeing begins to be mistaken for participating. Sharing a reel, TikTok or infographic now replaces organizing. 

Images give the public a sense of engagement with injustice, even when nothing materially changes. In this way, photography risks becoming a tool that absorbs political energy rather than helping activists mobilize. 

This tension is omnipresent in the constant circulation of images and videos of Palestinian suffering. Videos of bombings, injured children and grieving families are reposted endlessly, yet often reduced to spectacles of pain. 

These lives are hypervisible but not fully recognized as human — they’re seen without being grieved and documented without being defended. 

Philosopher Judith Butler describes this imbalance within their book “Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable,” as a question of how lives are considered “grievable,” arguing photos of torture and humiliation are themselves products of a rhetoric which certain people are less-than-alive. 

Sontag argues that photography reinforces dehumanizing rhetoric as well as desensitizes whoever consumes the images — making the photos less likely to cause social action. 

“The quality of feeling, including moral outrage, that people can muster in response to photographs of the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and the massacred also depends on the degree of their familiarity with these images,” Sontag wrote. 

Photography raises ethical questions about responsibility. Sontag argues cameras allow viewers to observe without intervening, freeing them from moral obligation.

“The camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed,” Sontag wrote. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” 

In an era of surveillance and constant documentation, this detachment becomes normalized. Death becomes content. 

Soviet film director Dziga Vertov once celebrated the camera’s ability to create a fresh perception of the world, revealing what was previously unseen. 

However, access is not inherently ethical — particularly when it includes graphic images of death. Exposure doesn’t always lead to understanding, mobilization and a more united world, it can lead to a world inherently valuing humanity less. 

Photography remains essential to democracy, but it’s not a neutral force. It demands ethicality from photographers, discernment from those who circulate images and responsibility from those who consume them.  

In a world saturated with constant visual evidence of suffering, the question is no longer whether injustice can be seen, but whether it can be viewed without eventual numbness — and how watching a person die has been reframed as just another form of content.