horrible image
昨天半夜看到一則新聞,儘管標題寫著horrible image,我還是看下去了。有個男人被攔腰夾在地鐵車廂跟月台間,他低著頭雙手掩著臉,沒有血,但是你感受到那個痛。然後就睡意全消。
於是對於隔天又看到下面這段話感到一陣震驚:
The possible contradictions of the war photograph now become apparent. It is generally assumed that its purpose is to awaken concern. The most extreme examples – as in most of McCullin’s work – show moments of agony in order to extort the maximum concern. Such moments, whether photographed or not, are discontinuous with all other moments. They exist by themselves. But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war. Either he shrugs off this sense of inadequacy as being only too familiar, or else he thinks of performing a kind of penance – of which the purest example would be to make a contribution to OXFAM or to UNICEF. (~John Berger, about looking)
的確是如此。