Indeed, the power of photographs lies in the fragments of history that we cannot take in. On December 16, 2014, Taliban stormed a children school in Peshawar, where more than a 100 children were killed. The photographs of blood bath and massacre in school still invites the most horrible memory our city Peshawar ever witnessed. It is that fragment of history we cannot take in. In contrast to this, when we see photographs of those young children dressed in uniforms, as a memory of who passed away in the attack still invokes a different kind of a meaning. A photograph freezes the moment between life and death. In that very moment, when a child was posing in school uniform, he was very well alive, unaware of what will happen to him. When today their parents hold photographs by protesting on roads to find justice hurts even more. After reading this, I think there is a need to do similar work which emphasizes that those killed in wars were human too. For instance placing the pictures of people in some seminar project where people could come and see who died in Drone strikes or military operations. It may evoke some anti-war sentiments that those killed were not just numbers or stats but human beings.

I think these are powerful lines. Its never easy to comprehend "Holocaust" pictures particularly when you know that the people you are seeing in pictures went through the worst humanity can imagine. It reminds of the film "The Pianist" which sensitized me about war. I couldn't take it in either, unless I saw my own people die in wars. Today when we see an archive footage of a friend/journalist killed in our regions evokes the same kind of feeling. He may be alive in the frame but is no more there.

There is a similar interesting discussion in Laura Mulvi's book death 24x a second: stillness and moving image. It discusses in detail the theoretical aspects of both photographic and moving images. Mulvey talks about delayed cinema, as if something remains dormant, wanting to be told. She believes it resonates with Freud's concept of deferred action. Freud concept of deferred action means something that is triggered after being exposed to some memory of past. Mulvey writes that a small child may not understand a sexual experience they witnessed as a child but it may remain in their sub conscious for long. May be later in the stage of maturity, a similar kind of exposure of trigger those hidden memories. This is exactly what photographs does as well i.e. It triggers memories. I think Mulvey's explanation of Freud makes sense i.e. photographs triggers memories.