The documentary predicament

As noted above, the purpose of documentary photography is to provoke a response in viewers. More specifically, by revealing hardship and mayhem and the suffering they generate, documentary aims to induce viewers to act to remedy the events that it depicts.Footnote 4 Critics, however, repeatedly have raised concerns about whether and how it might accomplish that task.

For example, in an essay initially published in 1972, John Berger offers a stinging diagnosis of what he calls ‘photographs of agony’. He notes that images of suffering and pain ‘bring us up short’. They are, as he puts it, ‘arresting’ precisely because ‘the moment of the other's suffering engulfs us’. In short, photographs of agony are gripping to the extent they generate compassion – shared suffering – in viewers.

For Berger, the impact of such images is profound if somewhat unexpectedly perverse. There is no effective action viewers of such images might take to alleviate the particular suffering they encounter in photographs. Any such suffering is well past any possible remedy. And this is true no matter how thoroughly distressing an audience might find the images to be. Consequently, on Berger's account, whatever distress or outrage ‘photographs of agony’ might induce in viewers can find no purchase. Although he recognizes that such photography aims ‘to awaken concern’, he fears that it readily can induce hopelessness. Berger sketches the resulting quandary as follows:

Viewers, in other words, seemingly confront troubling options: cynicism and despair on the one hand or diffuse humanitarian gestures on the other. Broader causal structures – structures that typically are political and economic – remain out of sight. As a result, and this is something Berger laments, what those who view images of suffering typically will not see, let alone take concerted political action to challenge, are the complicit government policies undertaken ‘directly or indirectly in “our” name’ that underwrite wars and the mass carnage, displacement and suffering they produce.Footnote 6 This process of depoliticization, I hope to establish, is animated by the expectation, among both photographers and their audiences, that photographs of agony should elicit compassion for those they depict.

While shocking pictures of the war in Vietnam prompted Berger's assessment of the politics of photography, his analysis applies more generally.Footnote 7 A decade later, Martha Rosler took up and extended his complaint. She too lamented that documentary photography seems to disable those who view it, leaving them with disagreeable options. She suggests that in ‘liberal documentary, poverty and oppression are almost invariably equated with misfortunes caused by natural disasters: causality is vague, blame is not assigned, fate cannot be overcome.’ Such work consequently ‘implores us to look in the face of deprivation and to weep (and maybe to send money, if it is to some faraway place where the innocence of childhood poverty does not set off in us the train of thought that begins with denial and ends with “welfare cheat”).’Footnote 8

As standardly practised, then, documentary photography makes possible two sorts of response. One can compassionately shed tears and then, perhaps, support humanitarian causes or one can adopt a cynical distance from any images of suffering she is shown. What remains if not impossible, then at least very, very unlikely, is that those who view images of oppressive or exploitative social realties will mobilize politically in hopes of transforming them.

Notice how compassion emerges here as a concern once again. Rosler criticizes the ‘documentary of the present’ for lacking the compassion of the ‘liberal documentary’ produced in earlier eras, even as she rightly notes that compassion represents the ‘weakest possible idea of (substitute for) social engagement’. She is right, as we shall see, in characterizing compassion as an inauspicious basis for political action. Here, though, it is important to pursue her observation that in contemporary documentary practice even so paltry a response seems problematic. ‘The exposé, the compassion, the outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism and metaphysics, trophy hunting – and careerism.’Footnote 9 Rosler's complaint, if I understand her, is that compassion rendered much classic documentary photography politically effective – in however attenuated a ‘liberal’ sense – and that contemporary practice is politically suspect at least in part because it barely can muster even compassion among those who view images of systematic devastation and hardship.

Rosler and Berger depict much the same quandary. They do so in nearly the same terms. And both bemoan it. One might wonder, though, how tightly this predicament constrains contemporary discussions of the politics of photography. In fact, the predicament they portray remains quite common.Footnote 10 Photographs of human suffering regularly elicit one of two intertwined responses, both of which blame the messenger, the photographer who produces the images. One response more or less resentfully lapses into despair and indifference or embraces cynicism. I set this response aside for the most part because it is parasitic on the notion that compassion affords a viable point of intersection for politics and photography. The second response, exemplified in the analyses of Susan Sontag, embraces compassion, and in the process unwittingly calls into question the viability to which I just referred. While this strategy seems less objectionable than a descent into cynicism or resentment, it ultimately remains self-defeating (and so invites the turn to cynicism) because it fails to grasp the arithmetic of compassion. In order to properly understand this, however, we first must examine the nature of compassion.

Compassion and its vicissitudes

Hannah Arendt is among the very few political theorists to analyse compassion. My aim is to extract her brief conceptual analysis not just from the more encompassing context of her thought but from the more particular purposes to which she put that analysis.Footnote 11 Arendt's analysis of compassion affords an auspicious point of departure for the subsequent parts of my argument in that it nicely sustains Herbert's insight into the arithmetic of compassion.

Arendt rightly suggests that compassion involves sharing the pain or misery – literally the passion – of another so intensely as to engender a sort of vicarious experience of suffering.Footnote 12 In that sense, compassion is aimed not at generalized suffering or even at the hardships and degradation of some class or group, but at the particular suffering of some other, distinct individual. And, according to Arendt, since when I experience compassion I feel, if only vicariously, the pain another suffers, I have a correlative desire to see her suffering remedied. This desire is not simply other regarding. It is amplified because I imagine that her particular suffering, or something quite like it, might actually befall me.

Arendt stresses two features of compassion that are salient in the present context because each constrains the ways compassionate individuals might respond to suffering. First, she appreciates the arithmetic of compassion. She insists that, unlike reason, compassion ‘can comprehend only the particular, but has no notion of the general and no capacity for generalization.’ It is this feature of compassion, its resolute focus on singularity and particularity, which deprives it of purchase in the face of large-scale suffering.Footnote 13 Secondly, Arendt argues that because compassion consists in taking on the suffering of another, it collapses the space of politics. It eliminates the space of argument and discussion through which people might forge common interests and principles.Footnote 14 Compassion, on her account, is relatively inarticulate and, while it need not render those who feel it wholly speechless, it characteristically manifests itself more in ‘gestures and expressions of countenance rather than in words’.Footnote 15 Arendt sees these two features as closely related and, in her mind, they conspire to render compassion ‘politically speaking, irrelevant and without consequence’.Footnote 16

Since compassion focuses resolutely on particular instances, it hinders our ability to grasp the broader political and social causes of suffering. And in so far as compassion undermines the space within which we might discuss those causes, it subverts our ability to explore possible effective ways to mitigate their broad effects. Thus, if Arendt is correct, it may seem that she understates her case. It is not that compassion is simply beside the point when it comes to politics. It seems more accurate to claim that compassion is de-politicizing. Arendt leads us to conclude that compassion has consequences that, from a political perspective, are highly suspect. And that, on her account, hardly is the most troubling eventuality that attends our compassionate impulses.

While she depicts compassion per se as politically otiose, Arendt warns that in the face of mass suffering, the concern that animates it threatens to mutate into something quite different and politically dire, namely pity.Footnote 17 According to Arendt, ‘compassion, to be stricken by the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not only not the same, they may not even be related.’Footnote 18 By contrast with compassion, pity is oriented towards generalized suffering and so ‘can reach out to the multitude’.Footnote 19 When I express pity for others, however, I depersonalize their suffering, treating those who endure pain and misery as an ‘aggregate’. Moreover, Arendt also points out that as I shift focus from the particular to the general case, the pity I feel takes on at least two features that are wholly foreign to compassion. First, my pity prevents me from seeing myself in those towards whom I express it; indeed, I feel sorry for them even though I presume it unlikely, perhaps impossible, that I ever actually might share anything like their plight. Pity thus establishes both a distance and an asymmetry between myself and those for whom I express it.Footnote 20 Secondly, pity cannot exist in the absence of suffering. It takes generalized suffering as its object and so potentially is boundless. In this it is unlike compassion that, because it involves sharing vicariously the suffering of some other, longs to see that suffering alleviated. Moreover, since it is an emotion, pity can be ‘enjoyed for its own sake’. So, perversely, those who pity others can come, however unselfconsciously, to savour the persistence of suffering.Footnote 21 Arendt finds this reflected in what she calls the ‘loquacity of pity’. Since it thrives on ongoing, if undifferentiated suffering, pity often is garrulous. It tends to manifest itself in a torrent of words, words that, ironically, exalt the suffering masses while remaining strangely indifferent to the despair and pain and misery of particular individuals.Footnote 22 This, as Arendt notes, is an invitation to political insensitivity and cruelty.

Redeeming a politics of compassion?

A sceptical reader might challenge Arendt's treatment as unacceptably old-fashioned, especially to the extent that it seeks to differentiate compassion (and other passions) quite starkly not only from emotions like pity but also, in ways I have not yet addressed, from principles like solidarity. One might further suppose that once we call that intellectual gerrymander into question, the predicament Arendt identifies would dissolve. Unfortunately, this objection does not survive closer examination.

To see why this is so, consider a competing, more contemporary attempt to link compassion and politics. Here, it is appropriate to turn to Martha Nussbaum whose analyses of gender, deprivation and development are particularly insightful.Footnote 23 Nussbaum presents compassion as the exemplar of emotions possessed of a variegated ‘cognitive structure’ and therefore as intimately connected with reason.Footnote 24 On her view, feelings of compassion involve a complex set of judgements. First, when I extend compassion to another, I assume her suffering or deprivation is profound. While I may sympathize with someone deprived of this or that comfort or convenience, I extend compassion to another only to the extent that she lacks the necessities – the nourishment, shelter, security and so forth – required to satisfy her basic needs or interests. Secondly, my compassion presumes that the deprivation another experiences is undeserved, that in large measure at least, she is suffering, as it were, through no fault of her own. Compassion, therefore, differs in this respect from mercy, which presumes that those on whom we bestow it are culpable for the painful circumstances in which they find themselves. Finally, the compassion I extend to another rests on an assessment that her suffering in some way not only violates my own scheme of human flourishing but that promoting her well-being is somehow crucial to my own goals and aspirations. This last assessment may, but need not, entail a judgement that I too might someday find myself in a similar predicament.Footnote 25 In any particular instance, each of these judgements may be contestable or, indeed, actively contested. Put more bluntly, assessments of need, responsibility and interdependence are political judgements and, on Nussbaum's account, each is necessary to any experience of compassion as distinct from feelings of sympathy, mercy or pity.

Nussbaum portrays compassion in a way that seemingly is at odds with Arendt. Yet while she insists that compassion cannot operate properly without reasoned assessments of the weight, genesis and circumstances of suffering, her analysis does not rescue compassion from Arendt's charge that it is politically irrelevant. This is so because, for Nussbaum, any such assessment derives from sources external to compassion itself and is meant to offset its limitations and specifically its intensely individualistic orientation. This remains obscure because Nussbaum and Arendt are engaged in quite different enterprises. Nussbaum is intent on establishing that compassion is an essential component in the motivational repertoire of citizens in liberal democratic polities. Arendt, by contrast, is offering what we might call a phenomenology of compassion in politics. Once we appreciate this difference, Nussbaum's analysis, quite unintentionally, underscores Arendt's critical insight into why compassion is politically irrelevant.

Nussbaum explicitly is concerned with ‘not just any and every type of compassion but, so to speak, compassion within the limits of reason, compassion allied with a reasonable ethical theory in the three areas of judgment.’Footnote 26 While compassion renders visible both the suffering of another and their desire to have their pain mitigated, it does not in itself afford an adequate basis for just social and political relations because it neither establishes anything like ‘a right or a just claim for redress’ nor provides grounds for second order sanctions against those who fail to act on claims for redress.Footnote 27 Compassion constitutes an ‘appropriate’ component of public life in liberal democracies only in that the judgements that necessarily inform it are grounded in a persuasive ethical theory that, in turn, is to be inculcated primarily via multicultural education and the arts.Footnote 28 Absent common acceptance of such a theory, to say nothing of the institutional arrangements needed to transmit it, compassion remains what she concedes is, by turns, an ‘unreliable and partial’ and a ‘fallible and imperfect motive’.Footnote 29 Whatever normative weight Nussbaum hopes compassion will bear – and hence whatever political relevance she might attribute to it – actually derives from the ethical theory she endorses.

We can, for present purposes, remain agnostic about Nussbaum's broader preoccupation with the ethical bases of liberal polities. Here, it is important to note three crucial points at which her characterization of compassion converges with Arendt's and one at which the two theorists diverge. First, Nussbaum, like Arendt, differentiates compassion from pity even as she acknowledges that the words commonly are used interchangeably. And she does so precisely because she recognizes that expressions of pity typically connote ‘condescension and superiority’ in ways that responding compassionately towards another does not.Footnote 30 Secondly, while Nussbaum denies that the compassion I might feel for another trades conceptually on a judgement that I someday might endure suffering similar to theirs, she concedes that such an assessment is ‘usually very important’ to the psychological processes by which I make the sorts of necessary judgements mentioned above.Footnote 31 In other words, having drawn an analytical distinction she then calls its practical import into question. Finally, and most importantly, Nussbaum reiterates Arendt's view that compassion focuses on the particular suffering of singular individuals. She does this tacitly inasmuch as, though she never raises the theme directly, her writing throughout treats compassion nearly exclusively as a response to the misery and deprivation of specifiable individuals. So, for instance, while Nussbaum posits compassion as ‘informing citizens’ understanding of the human meaning of catastrophes of many types’, she also consistently keeps her focus on the singular and particular, insisting, for instance, that ‘when we see that such a disaster strikes a human agent, it is then that we feel tragic compassion’.Footnote 32 In short, while Nussbaum sees compassion as closely linked to reason, this does not alter the limits that keep it concentrated on the suffering of a specific individual. She is concerned less with how we might use reason to generalize across cases than with how we use reason to assess the features of some particular case.

These three points of convergence make the way that Nussbaum diverges from Arendt unsurprising. Nussbaum attributes the shortcomings of compassion – the fact that in its everyday varieties it remains, in her own view, imperfect, partial, unreliable, fallible, uneven and so forth – largely to proximity, to our inability to identify with another individual if she is too distant from us.Footnote 33 In so doing, she obscures insight that Arendt offers into the way numbers disable compassion, rendering it at best a feeble resource in the face of large-scale suffering. In other words, unlike Arendt, Nussbaum fails to appreciate the arithmetic of compassion.

Where does all this leave us? Recall that, for Arendt, compassion is irrelevant politically for two related reasons. A compassionate individual suffers with some other identifiable individual. She remains correspondingly inarticulate in the face of such suffering and, since politics quintessentially involves debate and argument, her ability to act politically is severely impaired. Moreover, a compassionate individual is preoccupied with the suffering endured by some distinct other person and this resolute focus on the singular and particular is an active hindrance when we are confronted with cases of generalized, large-scale hardship and degradation. And the risk, in such instances, is that compassion will mutate into pity or cynicism or despair. The three features that, as noted in the last paragraph, Nussbaum attributes to compassion combine to sustain these same claims.

Thus, there are at least two possible conclusions to our discussion of compassion. The milder of these is that while we may well agree with Nussbaum that emotions like compassion commonly trade on complex judgements regarding particular cases in ways to which Arendt remains insufficiently attentive, her analysis does not rescue compassion from charges of political irrelevance. Nussbaum affords scant aid to those who presume that compassion affords a robust way of animating politics. The harsher conclusion is that compassion stands in a quite peculiar relation to politics. The cognitive structure of compassion, as Nussbaum depicts it, clearly consists in judgements that presume criteria of need, responsibility and interdependence that are themselves political. Yet while compassion presupposes this shared background, as Arendt suggests, it severely constrains our ability to act politically and hence to endorse or contest any such common judgements or the criteria on which they trade. It begins to look suspiciously like compassion is not so much politically irrelevant as de-politicizing and so, self-subverting.

Sontag and the pain of others

Compassion surreptitiously entraps critics and commentators who ponder the intersection of politics and photography. Susan Sontag provides an example of what follows from neglecting the features of compassion that Arendt highlights.Footnote 34 She begins with a commonplace regarding the tension between the documentary and aesthetic uses of photography:

Suppose we grant that Sontag is correct about what those unspecified ‘people want’. This allows us to notice that her complaint is not that aestheticized images of pain and suffering might induce ‘compassion or identification’ in viewers, but that those in whom they elicit such a response will come by their feelings in ways that are too easy or shallow and so somehow illicit.Footnote 36

Even as she presumes to articulate what ‘people want’, Sontag is preoccupied from beginning to end with a fundamental political problem, namely questioning the ‘we’ to whom photographs of suffering induced by war, epidemic, famine, environmental degradation, genocide and other man-made catastrophes might effectively be addressed.Footnote 37 While she ultimately never quite denies that such a ‘we’ can exist, Sontag apparently thinks the prospect quite dubious. It nevertheless is important to note two things. First, Sontag apparently presumes that the politics of photography consists simply in discovering a ‘we’ that exists, ready-made as it were, and waits only be addressed. Secondly, she seems to presume as well that in so far as any such ‘we’ exists, it will derive much, if not all, of whatever cohesion and force it can muster from the compassion felt by the individuals who make it up. That is what sustains Sontag's scepticism. Therefore, she asks: ‘What are we to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering?’Footnote 38 Her presumptions coalesce in a troubled reply:

These apprehensions in part reflect Sontag's plausible claim that, in order to be politically effective, images of war or other calamities must not only present the resultant suffering as deplorable and therefore as something that should be remedied, but also as something susceptible to remedy.Footnote 40 The difficulty, however, is not just, as Sontag fears, that compassion is insufficient or inadequate. Rather, it is that as a basis for political responses to such large-scale events, that is responses demanding a co-ordinated, collective response, compassion is self-defeating.

Like others who pin their hopes for political effectiveness on the compassion images might induce, Sontag finds herself in a moralistic bind that colours her estimation of the usefulness of photography.Footnote 41 The only response to suffering she seems able to envision is direct, presumably individual, humanitarian remedies taken to alleviate it. This divides Sontag's moral world neatly in two. Imagining a situation where we are confronted by ‘a photograph of a First World War veteran whose face has been shot away’, she announces that ‘perhaps’ the only ones with a right to view the image would be military surgeons who might directly ease his suffering: ‘The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.’Footnote 42 Her judgement is even harsher in circumstances where no such compassionate response seems imaginable. Thus, confronted by the well-known but nevertheless ‘upsetting’ photos taken by Khmer Rouge photographer Nhem Ein of thousands of Cambodians just before they were tortured and executed at Tuol Sleng prison, Sontag insists that ‘the viewer is in the same position as the lackey behind the camera’. On her account, looking at such photographs of atrocity makes viewers complicit more or less by default because the sheer scale of the crime renders those who suffered its effects inaccessible to compassion.

Sontag grasps Herbert's insight here, but only imperfectly. She recognizes that compassion fails because in these photographs the doomed Cambodians ‘remain an aggregate: anonymous victims’. But her grasp slips as she extends this insight to non-combatant casualties in war and victims of other large-scale crimes more generally. For these others ‘even if named’ are ‘unlikely to be known to “us” ’. This, she explains is because ‘the scale of war's murderousness destroys what identifies people as individuals, even as human beings. This, of course, is how war looks when it is seen from afar, as an image.’Footnote 43 So even as she initially echoes Herbert, Sontag ultimately reverts to form. She misconstrues the arithmetic of compassion, attributing the difficulty that large numbers pose for her favoured moral motivation to lack of proximity, to the distance that photographic images allow.

Sontag reworks all these themes when she turns to Sebastião Salgado, directing her critical comments at his recent work on refugees, migrants and other displaced populations.Footnote 44 Her judgement is unsparing. She starts with a polemical broadside, gratuitously depicting Salgado as a ‘photographer who specializes in world misery’. She then repeats a litany of complaints others have levelled at Salgado's earlier work – his images of human suffering are overly aestheticized, they have been displayed in offensively commercial venues, they are suffused in ‘sanctimonious’ rhetoric – that range from the merely contentious to the wholly specious.Footnote 45 Sontag neither explicitly endorses nor directly disputes such complaints. Only once she voices them, however, do we discover the actual source of her dissatisfaction with Salgado.

On Sontag's account, then, Salgado, just like Nhem Ein, depicts his subjects abstractly, as an anonymous aggregate. The problem for those who view his work is that, once more, their compassion finds no purchase.

I set aside the way Sontag flattens our ability to discriminate between entirely disparate uses of photography. I set aside too her dismissive view of politics. Instead, I wish simply to note that she here returns to the point from which she initially set out.

Sontag then persists in her worry that whatever compassion might be aroused in those who view images of suffering might be ill gotten, fraudulent. This worry, though, clearly is parasitic on the unstated presumption that the main, perhaps exclusive aim of such images is to elicit compassion in viewers. Yet this presumption seriously misapprehends compassion and its practical limits.

On Arendt's view, those who would ground the politics of photography in the capacity of images to arouse compassion in viewers face a debilitating dilemma. If photographers induce compassion for individual suffering, their work cannot help but be politically disarming. Yet if their work elicits pity for the suffering masses, they encourage (and perhaps themselves exhibit) politically repellent attitudes of superiority and disdain. This is precisely the bind in which Sontag finds herself when she confronts Salgado's photographic work. Since, as a body, they depict massive, man-made dislocation and displacement, the images that comprise his Migrations project afford her compassionate feelings no traction. Consequently, as her opening broadside attests, she must be suspicious of Salgado, for only pity or some similarly problematic motive could fuel his ‘abstract’ depiction of human suffering. Or so it seems.

This predicament is a recurrent one for Sontag. Her assessment of Salgado mirrors her earlier, highly critical treatment of Diane Arbus.Footnote 48 She finds in Arbus's insistently ‘anti-humanist message’ nearly the converse of Salgado's work and indicts both photographers for, in their very different ways, universalizing (and thereby rendering abstract) the pain of large numbers of people. If, as Sontag charges, any subject in an Arbus photograph is ‘a freak’, if ‘all her subjects are equivalent’, then compassion quite predictably loses its grip. Precisely because it cannot generalize, compassion is defenceless when faced with the ‘insistent sameness’ that Arbus captures in her images.Footnote 49

According to Sontag, Arbus created an extensive body of work explicitly intended to explore ‘the pain of others’. She then complains that Arbus, equally explicitly, eschewed ‘the compassionate purpose that such a project is expected to serve’.Footnote 50 Sontag never questions whether her own sense that politics can be fuelled by compassion might itself be disabling. Instead, she traces the difficulty to Arbus's personal motivations, to her psychological propensities and moral failings. These factors, she tells us, explain why Arbus was ‘drawn’ to ‘private rather than public pathology’, why her work ‘excludes sufferers who presumably know they are suffering, like victims of accidents, wars, famines, and political persecutions’. If, for Sontag, Salgado's motivations are suspect because he ‘specializes in world misery’, Arbus's are questionable because she ‘specialized’ in the wrong kind. With this, of course, Sontag returns precisely to the point at which she, Rosler and Berger converge in their worries about documentary. Arbus focused unrelentingly on individuals and so her images seem a natural vehicle for a politics of compassion. But since Arbus was pre-occupied with ‘slow-motion, private smashups’ instead of avoidable or remediable suffering, her images thereby portray ‘necessarily ahistorical subjects’, and so leave us no one to accuse or blame.Footnote 51

In her photographs, then, Arbus conveys what Sontag deems a disturbingly ‘private obsession’, one ‘based on distance, on privilege’. Sontag finds this work lacking because Arbus never aims to experience, actually or vicariously, the pain of others. She complains that Arbus does not properly identify with her subjects and so always and only views the suffering they endured ‘from the outside’.Footnote 52 Arbus fails, then, because she is not compassionate. Note, though, that in her remarks on Arbus, Sontag never considers, and so unwittingly recapitulates, those vicissitudes that Arendt and Herbert claim are inherent in compassion and that make her own aspiration to ground politics in it deeply suspect. Instead of questioning the political relevance of compassion, she complains that Arbus's images ‘render history and politics irrelevant’. The source of this failing is not so much that Arbus's work ‘does not invite the viewer to identify with’ her subjects and so ‘does not arouse any compassionate feelings’ as, much more fundamentally, that her ‘photographs make a compassionate response feel irrelevant’.Footnote 53 For Sontag, it seems, if compassion can get no grip, then the prospects for politics are bleak indeed. Having read Arendt though, we ought really to see this predicament quite differently. Its source resides in the impulse to ground politics in compassion in the first place.

How ‘images that evoke compassion’ are politically self-defeating

The practice of documentary photography, as Rosler reminds us, operates on the presumption that images not only can elicit a response in an audience but, ideally, might induce viewers to take some action to remedy any suffering or hardship they depict. Like Sontag, Rosler rightly insists that such circumstances must be susceptible to remedy.Footnote 54 Otherwise we are left with portraits of the human condition, of presumably timeless predicaments ordained by fate or nature or god, but regardless, against which any effort is futile. Why suppose, though, that the sought after response, the motivation for any remedial effort, ought to be compassionate? If the discussion to this juncture is at all persuasive, this presumption subverts concerted political action. Compassion is de-politicizing. Yet if we consider briefly how photographic convention operates in the work of several prominent photographers, it is easy enough to see how the impulse to compassion finds its footing among critics and commentators.

Consider first Diane Arbus, whose work Sontag found so troubling. As noted earlier, Arbus focuses resolutely on individuals. She depicts subjects whose social marginality – especially in so far as we treat this marginality as ‘natural’ by keeping out of sight the social norms and expectations that sustain it – subverts the prospect that viewers might identify with them. To the extent that all of Arbus's subjects are, as Sontag terms them, ‘freaks’, her images confound compassion. Her images might prompt viewers to confront the limits of their own capacity to be compassionate. Alternatively, they may provoke some viewers to follow Sontag and impugn Arbus's motivations. However, they do not explicitly prompt viewers to question the propriety of reacting compassionately at all. Indeed, Arbus's images arguably are effective in large measure because they create dissonance within viewers who, like Sontag, presume that pictures of ‘freaks’ ought to elicit an appropriately compassionate response but who themselves find it difficult to muster one.

In this respect, Arbus's work plays off conventions embodied in the work of predecessors. Here, I have in mind a lineage of broadly ‘liberal’ documentaries from Jacob Riis through Lewis Hine to the works of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and other photographers employed by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. The focus for these photographers too characteristically was on individuals, even as they presented individuals as exemplars of a group or circumstance.Footnote 55 Paradigmatic instances of this genre are Evans's portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs or Lange's ‘Migrant Mother’, both of which depict individual women as bearers of systematic hardships resulting, respectively, from cotton tenancy and economic dislocation during the years of the Great Depression.Footnote 56 These photographs – and others in this mode – solicit a compassionate response, inviting viewers to feel the pathos of the individual women.

This convention persists in the documentary work of contemporary photojournalists like James Nachtwey.Footnote 57 Much of this work initially is intended for, and often commissioned by, mass-circulation newsweeklies. When gathered for exhibitions or collected in books, Nachtwey's images underscore continuities, repetitions and sequences within and across his subjects. Either way, his work powerfully and relentlessly conveys the horrors of war, forced displacement, famine and other man-made calamities across several African countries, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. Yet Nachtwey too deliberately focuses, often in what might seem quite intrusive ways, on individuals. As he told an interviewer: ‘Virtually every picture in Inferno was made at close range. I like to work in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit. I want to give viewers the sense that they're sharing the same space with a photo's subject.’Footnote 58 So once again documentary style – specifically, the reliance on tightly framed images – invites compassion. About this Nachtwey again is quite explicit: ‘What allows me to overcome the emotional obstacles inherent in my work is the belief that when people are confronted by images that evoke compassion, they will continue to respond, no matter how exhausted, angry or frustrated they may be.’Footnote 59 Here, though, Nachtwey unintentionally highlights the predicament we confront as he describes his broader social and political ambitions. His work will, he hopes, contribute to an ‘ongoing dialogue between information and response that helps create an atmosphere in which change is possible’. In that sense, Nachtwey suggests that his ‘job is to help reach a broad base of people who translate their feelings into an articulate stance, then through the mechanisms of political and humanitarian organizations, bring pressure to bear on the process of change’.Footnote 60

Even setting aside the difficulties involved in coordinating ‘a constituency’ around any social or political issue, this aim is laudable. If nothing else, Nachtwey articulates political aspirations foreign to either Arbus or the liberal documentarians. Moreover, he does not overreach. He sees his work only as one component of such political processes. The problem is that, if Herbert and Arendt are right, the aspiration to kindle compassion among viewers operates at cross-purposes with that of prompting them to elaborate an ‘articulate stance’ on pressing political events.

In this sense, Sebastião Salgado, whose work drew Sontag's special ire, provides a useful counterpoint to Nachtwey. Salgado too repeatedly insists that he hopes his work will ‘provoke debate’ or ‘provoke a discussion’ about the circumstances he photographs and, especially, about the social, economic and political processes that produce those circumstances.Footnote 61 But, unlike Nachtwey, Salgado also insists: ‘If the person looking at my pictures only feels compassion, I will believe that I have failed completely.’Footnote 62 To the best of my knowledge, Salgado himself never explicitly makes the connection between his aspiration to provoke debate and this remark about compassion. On the view I advance, however, inducing compassion is not merely a failure at the level of individual viewers, it actually will vitiate the potential of his images to contribute to the political processes of argument and discussion for which he hopes.

Re-reading Salgado

We should not be surprised, given his own stated position, that Salgado's work confounds the expectations of Sontag and others who insist that compassion provides the nexus of politics and photography. The source of bewilderment for such viewers, though, resides more with their misplaced expectations than with his work. Yet it is one thing for Salgado to articulate his aspirations and attitude in the ways just mentioned and quite another to show how his work embodies those views. It is important, in other words, to show how Salgado offers, in however tentative and incomplete a way, a strategy for extricating photographic practice from the counterproductive dynamic in which thwarted compassion transmutes itself into pity or cynicism or despair or indifference.

I follow Sontag here and focus attention on Salgado's Migrations project. I follow her too in focusing primarily on the pictures themselves and less on the institutional exigencies of exhibitions over which he has relatively limited control.Footnote 63 With these caveats stated, what do we find when we view the images Salgado presents in Migrations: Humanity in Transition? The cover hints at Salgado's strategy. It reproduces in a continuous band reduced versions of nineteen of the most striking images from the project. Characteristically, these are photographs of widely disparate places. Characteristically, they are presented in series, accruing effect from their proximity to one another. And characteristically too, their focus shifts back and forth between individuals, groups of varying sorts and sizes, and what might be accurately termed populated landscapes. In other words, the cover presages how recurrent and overlapping Salgado's subjects are and how, in depicting them, he departs from the convention of focusing almost exclusively on individuals.

The book is divided into four thematic sections, devoted respectively to the ubiquitous phenomenon of forced migration, to persistent political violence and economic devastation in Africa, to the massive rural-to-urban exodus and conflicts over land across Latin America, and to similar processes of rampant urbanization throughout Asia. Within each section, he presents images serially or, more accurately, as multiple series of images, sometimes overlapping, sometimes merely adjacent, that together pose questions about continuities, similarities and recurrences across time, locale and subject.Footnote 64 In his work, Salgado depicts the effects of patterns and interdependencies that, while themselves extraordinarily difficult to represent, give shape to global social, economic and political processes. This does not mean that, within the larger corpus of his work, no individual images stand out as singularly striking or arresting: quite the contrary. It does mean that critics who become overly preoccupied with these misconstrue his broader project.

The very first picture in Migrations strikes a discordant note for those schooled in the conventions of documentary photography. It is large, occupying completely two facing pages, and depicts many hundreds of migrants crossing, illegally but with seeming impunity, Rio Suchiate at Mexico's southern border with Guatemala. The scene takes place in close proximity to an official border crossing. It provides a baseline too for the images that immediately follow. This series depicts individuals and groups travelling as stowaways on northbound freight trains and then the interconnected exigencies – steel barriers, the Border Patrol, unscrupulous smugglers, extremely dangerous weather conditions and vast expanses of desert – that bar their way upon reaching Mexico's northern border with the United States. Salgado clearly hopes to convey the danger and adversity that individual migrants endure. There is no sense in which he discounts individual risk and hardship. But the initial image poses the question of how many thousands, indeed millions, of individual lives are at stake.

Salgado presents variations on this pattern throughout Migrations. He typically presents images of individual migrants within a context set by photographs depicting groups that sometimes are so large that they verge on being populations. Often, the latter are tightly framed and so crowded, affording a glimpse, if not the sound and feel and smell of the congestion and jostling and general havoc that constitutes daily life for displaced persons regardless of whether they are in transit or ‘settled’ in camps. Several of the most striking images in the book – especially those of ‘refugee’ camps often located in what might otherwise be strikingly beautiful settings – cross genres to contribute new meaning to the phrase ‘the political landscape’. In both of these sorts of images, Salgado departs markedly from the preoccupation with individual suffering exemplified by Arbus, Evans, Lange and Nachtwey.

The vastness of the dislocation and displacement Salgado depicts is stupefying. The disorientation his work induces, though, does not evince a misplaced search for a compassionate audience. It derives instead from the scale of the phenomena he depicts, the questions he raises about them and from the reflexivity of photographic depiction, itself.Footnote 65 Photography is a technology used, among other things, to ‘amplify’ our own imagination and to ‘incite’ the imaginings of others. Like photographic depictions more generally, Salgado's work allows us - again among other things – to imagine actual but quite alien states of the world and, simultaneously, to see ourselves doing so.Footnote 66 So it is plausible to attribute the bewildering impact of Salgado's work to the imaginative acts we undertake when confronted by his images. We imagine the calamitous realities he presents and are aware that we are doing so. We ask ‘what is this I am looking at?’ We ask ‘how is this possible?’ We ask, sometimes, ‘is this necessary, unavoidable, inevitable?’ Our confusion, refracted through our relative security and privilege, stands as a counterpoint to that of the displaced, many of whom themselves have at best a partial understanding of the forces that intrude momentously into their lives.Footnote 67 The disorientation, however, is our own not theirs and, ironically perhaps, the imaginative acts from which it springs afford at least a partial basis from which to ponder the third of the questions Salgado provokes.

Photography and the politics of solidarity

Individuals suffer and perish as a result of war, famine, disease, economic dislocation and other man-made, and so in principle preventable, calamities. Salgado depicts individuals as they endure such hardships and humiliations. But his pictures do more than that. They work to establish patterns, to suggest or at least prompt viewers to raise questions about causes and interdependencies. They work, too, to raise questions about responsibility, rationalizations and redress. While his images may not invariably succeed, they take aim, at least, at questions of politics and causality that, as Rosler, Berger and Sontag all rightly indicate, bedevil photography. In so doing, they direct our attention away from an exclusive focus on suffering individuals. They thus depart from the conventions of social documentary and so offer an alternative to compassion and its vicissitudes. Yet, having diverted our attention from exclusive concern with individual hardship and deprivation, where do they direct us instead? Salgado is quite explicit about this. He offers a modest sort of ‘hope’ that his work can help us elaborate ‘a real idea of solidarity and a real idea of community’.Footnote 68 In this conclusion, I suggest a way of understanding his aspiration.

Arendt's insight that compassion is politically irrelevant enables us to see how common understandings of the sort Sontag articulates hinder efforts to create a politically useful documentary practice. Arendt also maps a more fruitful terrain for such a politics, one that insists that the audience to which photographs of mass suffering and deprivation are directed itself needs to be constructed politically. In this way, she addresses the crucial, seemingly impossible, task of creating the ‘we’ that so preoccupies Sontag and that must be a central concern too for critics like Rosler and Berger who are interested in alternatives to the baleful dynamic in which photographs of hardship and suffering seem mired.

Arendt differentiates compassion from pity and the perversities that trail in its wake. She also contrasts both compassion and pity with solidarity.Footnote 69 Since, on her account, solidarity necessarily is inflected with reason, and especially with the capacity for generalization, it holds out the possibility that we might ‘establish deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of interest with the exploited and oppressed’.Footnote 70 Unlike compassion, solidarity does not demand that I partake vicariously in the pain of another. It does not, in other words, subject those who express it to the imperative to focus on a suffering individual. Moreover, solidarity avoids the arithmetic of compassion without falling prey to the repugnant political alternative offered by pity. Since both are depersonalized, solidarity resembles pity, but only superficially so. While both allow us ‘to comprehend the multitude’, they operate in strikingly different ways. Where pity is parasitic on continued suffering, solidarity can be used to help rectify it. This difference arises because solidarity is a principle rather than an emotion, and so ‘solidarity, while it may be aroused by suffering, is not guided by it’. Solidarity can instead generalize to large numbers ‘conceptually’.Footnote 71 I return to this in a moment. Here, we must merely see that while solidarity may fail and often surely does, it is liable to neither the political irrelevance of compassion nor the political perversities of pity.

In order to appreciate how solidarity operates, it will help to connect Arendt's analysis with a very prominent, more recent discussion. Like Arendt, Richard Rorty rightly sees ‘solidarity as made rather than found, produced in the course of history rather than recognized as an unhistorical fact.’Footnote 72 Like Arendt too, for Rorty solidarity consists in the effort, at least, to generalize, ‘to extend our sense of “we” to people whom we have previously thought of as “they”.’Footnote 73 And, importantly in the current context, Rorty sees this as consisting in the effort to see others as the sorts of being who can suffer pain and humiliation in the same ways ‘we’ do. Rorty, however, would very likely resist Arendt's claim that solidarity is a ‘principle’, and he surely would resist the notion that its capacity to generalize derives from ‘reason’. I cannot adjudicate this apparent disagreement here. It is important nonetheless to see that we might perhaps reconcile Rorty and Arendt in a local and provisional way. By this I mean that the reconciliation I propose is useful in the context of the current argument and need not lead to a larger consideration of the significant differences that remain between them.

Rorty depicts solidarity not as a ‘moral motivation’ but instead as the product of ‘imaginative identification’.Footnote 74 In so doing, he is reacting to moral philosophers who are preoccupied with the corollary tasks of deriving duties and obligations from principle and identifying motivations that might induce properly moral agents to act in ‘principled’ ways.Footnote 75 Moral philosophers, though, are not terribly reliable guides regarding the role principle plays in politics. In so far as Rorty reacts to their work by endorsing an ‘ethics without principles’, he himself labours in the shadow of an unreliable view of how we use principles.Footnote 76

Here, Arendt offers a useful alternative. On her account, ‘solidarity is a principle that can inspire or guide action’.Footnote 77 Like other principles, solidarity operates externally, in the public world, and so differs qualitatively from passions and emotions that serve as internal motivations.Footnote 78 This public character encourages us to adopt an instrumental conception of principles.Footnote 79 Arendt and Rorty both recognize that principles inspire. It is more accurate to say, though, that among the things we do with principles is to attempt to inspire ourselves and others. However, we use principles for other things as well. We use them to generalize and, more specifically, we use them to ‘license a subjunctive inference’ from existing instances or cases or observations to new ones.Footnote 80 In other words, we use principles to establish what we might call similarity relations that warrant our conceiving of two or more things as sufficiently alike that we can treat them in the same ways. Here, the instrumental uses of solidarity hopefully are clear. We deploy the principle of solidarity in our attempts to establish that some ‘others’, whom we heretofore have not considered as being like ‘us’, or whom we perhaps have altogether failed to consider in any way whatsoever, are indeed like us after all.

This, then, is the upshot of the provisional reconciliation I propose. We can, with Arendt, insist that solidarity is a principle rather than, as Rorty sometimes insists, a shared ‘feeling’ whose emergence and proliferation are attributable to what he would call some ‘sad, sentimental story’.Footnote 81 Conversely, we can join Rorty in understanding the demands of solidarity as pressing us to imagine others as part of ‘us’ or ‘we’ rather than as ‘they’. Finally, we can see that this expanded ability to recognize similarities between others and ourselves is really part of our broader capacity to entertain new possibilities. Since this capacity operates at the intersection of imagination and reason, we can, by accommodating both Rorty and Arendt, begin to understand that our abilities to envision possibilities and to calibrate our beliefs and desires are intimately intertwined.Footnote 82

Here, finally, we return to the politics of photography and specifically to the lessons Salgado offers. As Rorty suggests, the task of establishing solidarity relies on our ability to convey ‘detailed descriptions’ of hardship and suffering.Footnote 83 Photography offers a technology for doing just that. In the case of Salgado's work on migration and displacement, it allows enormous displaced populations to, as Herbert puts it, ‘speak to the imagination’ of viewers who will in all likelihood never experience the same plight. More precisely, his work allows us to imagine in the reflexive way sketched earlier systematic realities that might otherwise remain wholly out of sight.

We in the developed world have limited exposure to forced migration. It is perhaps more accurate to say that we have proven adept at limiting our exposure. In no small measure, this task is facilitated by what, for us, is a convenient reality. Most refugees are concentrated in developing countries. For legal purposes, the majority of forced migrants, because they do not cross international boundaries, are not officially refugees but, rather, internally displaced persons. And most of those in that category too are concentrated in developing countries. It is not that no refugees or displaced persons inhabit developed countries – to suggest otherwise would be disingenuous. It nevertheless remains true that the vast majority of such political and economic dislocation, and indeed what arguably are the most dire instances of it, occurs safely out of ‘our’ sight in the poor, developing world.Footnote 84

Salgado understands this reality and takes liberties with it.Footnote 85 Recall the initial sequence of photographs in Migrations. My earlier discussion was concerned to illustrate how Salgado places images of individual hardship in the context of photographs depicting large populations. He does not lose sight of individual suffering; he simply hopes, for reasons that should by now be clear, to prevent our being consumed by it. In that initial sequence, Salgado highlights the contrast between the two borders and so raises questions about what we might mean when we talk about the free movement of goods and people. It seems clear that he hopes to underscore how the trip becomes riskier and more difficult as migrants travel northwards. The scene on the banks of the River Suchiate depicts the bustling activity of large numbers of men, women and children all more or less completely out in the open. The images of the Mexico–United States border, by contrast, depict furtive individuals and small groups trying to cross the border and, with notable lack of success, to evade the Border Patrol.

It surely is not accidental that Salgado begins the book with this sequence. Nor is it accidental that he follows it immediately with another, this time depicting the harrowing efforts of African migrants to cross from Morocco to Spain in small boats at the Straits of Gibraltar. Nor, again, is it accidental that he follows that with a third sequence that depicts Russian Jews migrating to New York. In each instance, he uses the same representational strategy, situating individuals and groups against the backdrop of populations. The cumulative effect is to increase the numbers at a measured rate. In this way, Salgado arrives only slowly at his images of the camps housing displaced populations of Palestinians in Lebanon, Kurds in Turkey, Vietnamese in Hong Kong and Indonesia, and Bosnians, Croats, Gypsies, Kosovars and Serbs across the Balkans. Only gradually does he then move into Africa, Latin America and Asia. In other words, Salgado gradually challenges those in the developed world who will pick up his book simultaneously to examine their restrictive notions of ‘we’ and expand them to encompass others. At each juncture, he poses a question to us, asking in effect, whether it is possible to establish what Arendt would call ‘a community of interest’ with this ‘exploited and oppressed’ population and then with these too. The difficulty in our reply surely has partly to do with distance. It would be foolish to deny that. But it has more, I think, to do with numbers, with the difficulty of allowing the aggregate to speak to our imaginations.

Once we understand compassion, its limits and the temptations to which it gives rise, we can see why conventional documentary founders on its arithmetic. Salgado departs from conventional practice, directing our attention away from suffering individuals and asking that we attend as well to the large populations, the aggregates, of which those individuals are a part. To that extent, he places the possibility of solidarity on the table. In so doing, he does not offer a substitute for political action, just an invitation to move in that direction. In the process he holds out hope, too, that we might resuscitate the politics of photography.