Blog Post: Megan Baaske

At this exact moment, if you got to the New York Times homepage, you will see a picture of moon and star watermelons, accompanying a story on endangered plants. Earlier, it was an image of Obama, as he responded to questions about his ex-pastor’s speech a couple of days ago. By the time you’re reading this, the homepage has been updated countless of times; each article adorned with an accompanying photograph.

It may be self-evident to point out that we are bombarded with pictures everywhere we turn. From the moment we turn on the computer, the television, the ipod, even our cell phones, we take in images.

Because one of the goals of pluralist photography is to prompt social change (or, at the very least, raise awareness through the photographs), one must concern herself with the over-saturation of images. Do we suffer from picture fatigue?

Well, yes.

But it doesn’t necessarily follow that photographs no longer impact us. Instead, it just means that every picture will not.

Not to get too technical, but one Communication theory is called the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), which is particularly useful in discussions of photo-fatigue. The theory suggests that people have two routes of processing information: the central and the peripheral. People have to process a great deal of data in a single day, not just pictures, but entire narratives, arguments, and facts. We cannot keep up with all the stuff we’re bombarded with. Consequently, we divide all that information between the two pathways. The central pathway is for information we really care about-we think about it a great deal, analyze it critically, and tend to remember it longer. The peripheral pathway is for information less relevant to our lives (however we interpret that); we tend to assign less value to this data and forget it easier.

Photographs, like political arguments or advertisements, can go through either process. Many of the pictures, like the endangered watermelons, will end up in the periphery. I will forget it soon after I finish writing this blog. But some pictures stick with us. Perhaps because they are particularly moving. Perhaps because, as Susan Sontag suggests in Photography, we are “charmed by the insignificant detail” (99). Perhaps because they make us think more deeply about their subject.

For whatever reason, these are the pictures that stand out from the rest, the ones that we process through our central pathway. We think about the argument they make, the people on display in them, and how they make us feel. Iconic images have this weight. Who cannot conjure up an image of the World Trade Center on 9/11? Who hasn’t seen the picture of the sailor kissing his girlfriend after the end of WWII? Who can’t remember the horror on the Vietnamese girl’s face after the napalm attack on her village? There are countless of images that have entered our collective psyche.

But, more often, images do not become universal like those I’ve just mentioned. Only a select few can become icons. Nevertheless, some of the photographs that I encounter may be processed centrally. I was at a photography exhibit in Amsterdam’s Foam Photography Museum, and I saw the most heart-wrenching images from an Iraqi hospital. I still remember those pictures. They were so graphic I could not stand to look at them, but the War in Iraq has never felt more real to me. For the first time, I believed I had a small idea of what it must be like in that far off country. Though most of my compatriots have never seen those images, many have seen similarly eye-opening ones of the War in Iraq or other crises throughout the world. We are all impacted by photographs in different ways, but the point is that we are all impacted. Not by every picture we see, but by the one that we pause to think about in more detail. Those are the ones that can cause true social change.

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