A Picture to Haunt the World

CEBU, Philippines - After all the years, her eyes are still sea green, still haunted and still angry. Which is understandable. She comes from a nation that had gone through 20 years of war, leaving a million and a half people killed and another three and a half million refugees.

Sharbat Gula, perhaps, is the moment in time a photographer lives to capture. A moment that defines an aspect of humanity. English art critic John Berger said that "Photographs remind us of the lived reality behind the abstractions of political theory, casualty statistics, and news bulletins."

Photographs then become reflections of the various truths that affect. From the children, in their tender age, brought to death by wars to houses ravaged by disasters - those images have an effect that prompt people to move the mouse and click "like" or "share," after all, one is just human.

Along with the shrinking of the world due to modern technological advances is the convergence of personal spaces of people. Technology is catalyst to the lines of the personal being blurred and the lives of strangers coming together at a single point. Part of the existence in the World Wide Web is the exposure to hordes of photos.

Involvement, though, often ends after the push of a button.

From time to time, photos become iconic because they present a reality so harsh and true. French photographer Oliver Ciappa's photo of Florent Manaudou and Frédérick Bousque, both top world swimmers, as an imaginary couple to Georgina Wilson and Isabelle Daza's controversial kissing photo, took on the discrimination against homosexuality. Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-winning photo of a Sudanese child crawling towards a United Nations feeding station as a vulture lurks nearby addressed the famine in Africa. Photos become iconic because they talk about real people and real situations.

Still, not understanding the context of the photo reduces it into a table of information. Modernity teaches people to be satiated with the whos, whats, wheres, and whens. The heavier questions - the hows and the whys - are left unasked. In such arrangement, photos become impersonal and public; they become very little information about the life, memories and experiences of a distant stranger.

American writer Susan Sontag added that public photographs enable outsiders from the experience to know of the pain felt, but not necessarily feel it. "Liking" or "sharing" becomes a testament of pity.

"So far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence," Sontag said.

"Sharing" and "liking" turns the plight into a commodity. Life becomes commodity. Freedom is no more than a piece of bread one can purchase. Happiness is indirectly bought. Response to others' plight should be outside the emotional tendencies.

People need not just feel, but act out empathy. Without asking why and how, people are blinded and merely become viewers of the experience. Making sense of a photo is a step to helping others not suffer the same fate as those captured by the camera's lens. The first step in affecting change is for people to know and understand.

Photos, on their own, will not change the world. They won't topple corrupt and cruel regimes. They won't feed the hungry.

Every photo tells a story. When one knows the story, what is at stake will be known. Life of children of the universe. The right to be accepted by the society. The freedom taken away by oppressors.

A change can only come when people know. When they do, they will hopefully be moved to find ways to help make the world better for all. We are, after all, of the same species, sharing the same humanity.