The shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings, just as the surprise and bemusement felt the first time one sees a pornographic movie wear off after one sees a few more. The sense of taboo which makes us indignant and sorrowful is not much sturdier than the sense of taboo that regulates the definition of what is obscene. And both have been sorely tried in recent years. The vast photographic catalogue of misery and injustice throughout the world has given everyone a certain familiarity with atrocity, making the horrible seem more ordinary  —  making it appear familiar, remote (“it’s only a photograph”), inevitable. At the time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images. After thirty years, a saturation noint may have been reached. In these last decades, “concerned” photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arous it.

Images anesthetize. An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs —  think of the Vietnam War. (For a counter-example, think of the Gulag Archipelago, of which we have no photographs.) But after repeated exposure to images it also becomes less real.

Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic — Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Taking photographs fills the same need for the cosmopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat trip up the Albert Nile or their fourteen days in China as it does for lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls.

dependence on the camera, as the device that makes real what one is experiencing, doesn’t fade when people travel more.

But despite the presumption or veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth.

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, crooned, retouched, doctored, tricked out.  They age,  plagued by fhe usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable and get bought and sold; they are reproduced.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.