To look at a photograph depicting horror compromises us but it is better than indifference

When confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, as in Paris we are incredulous yet straining at our horror is our need at times like for a degree of psychological adulthood.

As Susan Sontag puts it, 'to look at a photograph is to pay attention. And attention, however compromised, is better than indifference or ignorance.'

Her argument is persuasive because she makes no remedial claim for photography. ‘To designate a hell is not . . . to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell . . . Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others.’ To look at a photograph is to pay attention. And attention, however compromised, is better than indifference or ignorance:

Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood . . . No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.