Pragmatism to Sentimentalism

                Anyone, including Sontag herself, must agree that pictures can be immensely powerful.  Rooted in inspiration, vision, or worldly emotion, pictures can evoke jubilant and sadness, anger and forgiveness.

American tourist offers his shoes to a Brazilian orphan

      Put in the hands of a skilled artist, photographs can be symbols of the human experience.  Although the photographs "will always be some kind of sentimentalism"(Sontag 24-25), in no way are they a source of "mental pollution"(Sontag 39).

        If anything, photographs are a source of mental purity, to see truth in a world too often filled with thick smoke and empty mirrors. To me, even the most horrible of propaganda through pictures is beautiful, not in its message but in its delivery.

        To see black Olympians raise their fists in solidarity, or to see liberated Jews during the Holocaust, is humanity is its raw form. Undying                                                                                         emotions are weaved into the pictures, and they                                                                                       move me in their cause.

Lone pacifist during the Tiananmen Square Massacre

          Photographs have got me thinking, "filling[ing] the blanks...of the present and the past"(Sontag 9-10).  I can recall the first time I saw the picture on the right.  Still young then, I remember worrying for the man in the picture, how it was such a dangerous, and borderline suicidal, thing to do.

          But over time, as I better understood the man's motivations, I realized that for those who would be willing to sacrifice everything for their cause acts of extreme courage came naturally.  It was still dangerous, but it was dangerous and brave.  One peaceful man against an entire army.

Protester offers a flower in 1967 Vietnam War Protests

              So in the end, I disagree, Sontag. Pictures don't distort our attitudes, they purify them in a raw wave of emotion.  To see clearly a cause, whether it be political or just human, is a photograph's greatest gift. A picture isn't just worth a thousand words--its worth millions of stories, woven together into an beautiful and often terrible history.

~Chris

Tommy Smith and John Carlos in the Black Power Movement

Liberated Jewish Prisoners at Farsleben