Horrific Blindness

David Campbell, "Horrific Blindness: Images of Death in Contemporary Media", Journal for Cultural Research, Vol.8, No.1, Routledge, 2004.


David Campbell is a Professor of Cultural and Political Geography at Durham University. His academic research deals with visual culture and international politics in use of photographs, multimedia, in the representation of atrocity, famine and war.

In this essay Horrific Blindness, Campbell explores how death is imaged in contemporary media. He questions the power of media and photography of images of death and atrocity.

I personally found this article very powerful and interesting in relation to representation and morality in our world. It is true that we are constantly dealing with death through media and we become so familiar with images of war, violence and famine from overuse in the media. As result, even though photography still has its political power to move people into certain actions, it could be seen as it lost its power to mobilize us politically against the atrocities happening daily around the world. Like in Campbell’s view, what we see through photographs or media is mediated and what we see is a sanitized version. Therefore, photography has been acknowledged as a weak medium to make the public offended by crimes. In addition, because it has been shaped in this system for so long, now this system is unable to change the political structure of society.

In the conclusion of the essay Horrific Blindness, Campbell (70) noted the significance of context in relation to images. While he explained interplay of three contextual dimensions, he argues pictures alone will not change the situation in Sudan which explains the significance of the social context for the creation of pictorial meaning (71). His interplay of three contextual dimensions includes, ‘the economy of indifference to others, the economy of "taste and decency" whereby the media itself regulates the representation of death and atrocity, and the economy of display, wherein the meaning of images is produced by the intertextual relationship of captions, titles, surrounding arguments and sites for presentation’ (70).

I believe a haunting photograph of the Sudan famine by South African free-lance photographer Kevin Carter (1961-1994) fits well with the idea Campbell is exploring. Carter took his own life months after winning a Pulitzer Prize because of the heavy criticism he came under for just photographing the little girl who had to stop, and was struggling to get to a feeding center, being watched by a vulture.

"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene."[1]

I believe this photograph is documenting the history of Sudan as well as lots of other contextual issues like economy, and also questioning the issue of morality, because of surrounding arguments relevant to the Sudan famine and issues of the artist’s morality creating the whole pictorial meaning.


[1] Macleod, Scott. "The life and death of Kevin Carter: Visiting Sudan, a little-known photographer took a picture that made the world weep. What happened afterward is a tragedy of another sort.” September 09 2009.
http://www.thisisyesterday.com/ints/KCarter.html