The Catastrophe as Image

Hundreds of images, every day.

Grey as the dominant tone, at times interrupted by a flash of orange, a coloring book, a doll.

At other times, images reach us stained with memories, those of strangers we do not know, who do not know us, and who may no longer recognize their own.

Memories held in suspension.

Fleeting flashes across phone screens. Fragments scrolling on television beneath a red ticker hastily composed, saturated with approximations, where a place name is thrown in as a token of precision. Or brief sequences designed to sustain the continuity of an endlessly renewed flow.

Within this flow, the image ceases to emerge as an event.

It becomes inscribed within a continuous visual regime, profoundly reconfiguring our relationship to war and to what we perceive of it.

With technological shifts, instant capture, immediate publication, and limitless circulation, the place of the image has shifted. That of the viewer as well.

The image forms at the very heart of the event and reaches us in the same movement.

It circulates even as the event persists.

And we, recipients adrift in a sea of visual strikes, find ourselves questioning pain, what reaches us of it, what recedes, what settles, what escapes.

Perhaps also the very legitimacy of looking.

Within this accelerated visual regime, catastrophe settles into a continuous presence, depositing in memory an incomplete trace.
If it leaves a trace at all.

In the aftermath of the July 2006 war, I undertook a research project centered on the press photographer as a nodal point.

The aim was to examine his position, the decisions he makes, and those that precede the image.

Many of those I met insisted on this: the image is never the product of a pure instant, but a construction, an arrangement of angle, temporality, and selection.

One of them spoke of the weight of a constant responsibility: determining the conditions under which war becomes visible, deciding what enters the frame and what is excluded.

Two decades ago, the image was something one looked at, something one kept.

It had its own time. Its duration. Its imprint.

Today, it accumulates to the point of exceeding any possibility of narrative containment.

This accumulation does not become memory; it produces dispersion.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag interrogates the relationship between image and suffering, and the limits of what images can convey.

“Images do not explain; they attest that something has happened.”

They fix the occurrence without providing the means to understand it.

As their circulation accelerates, images lose their capacity to carry stable meaning and become units within a visual flow.

The dulling Sontag describes is tied to the density of images, to their speed of circulation, but also to the very conditions of looking and to the place assigned to the viewer within this apparatus.

Here, the question of meaning begins to slip. “The understanding of suffering is not given; it must be constructed.”

Seeing is not enough to grasp catastrophe.

Meaning takes shape within a context, from a position, that of the one who looks, and that of the one who receives.

Hence her warning: “We should not assume the existence of a single ‘we’ when the subject is looking at the suffering of others.”

Much has been written about the “silence of the world” in the face of the devastation of Gaza.

How do “others” remain silent before the bodies of naked children?

And we, in Lebanon today, write similar things about our own reactions to a town that has been erased.

Do we relate to this place in the same way? Do we rely on projection to generate empathy?

Does indifference, for some, take shape as a defensive strategy?

Looking is not a shared experience.

It is shaped by distance, by the possibility of exposure, by one’s relation to danger.

Contemporary studies of violent imagery, which initially asked what these images do to us, now turn toward the act of looking itself: how do we look, when, and under what conditions?

In Lebanon, this visual reconfiguration has intensified over the past decade.

The image has shifted from the register of testimony to that of immediate experience.

Those who film are often already caught within the event.

The phone has become an extension of the body: trembling, sonic saturation, shock—everything now inscribes itself within the frame.

In this moment, the position of looking fractures.

The viewer inhabits the image as much as they observe it.

We, if such a “we” can still be sustained, are no longer those who look at catastrophe from a distance.

We have become those who are looked at.

This shift exceeds the event itself.

It reappears with each crisis, each escalation, each “new catastrophe.”

But since the war in Gaza, and through the two most recent wars in Lebanon (which we are still living through), an additional layer has imposed itself upon this visual regime.

Images no longer belong solely to the domain of testimony. They now include falsified images, generated by artificial intelligence, or stripped from other contexts.

They circulate at the same speed, producing real affects despite the absence of the events they claim to document.

This is not merely a failure of representation, but a destabilization of the image’s status as evidence. In many cases, its truth becomes undecidable.

“The image is not a substitute for reality,” Sontag writes.

From the index, it has become a milieu, a site of circulation, transformation, and the reconfiguration of perception.

Within this space, the position of looking shifts once more: it anchors itself in continuous exposure, at the expense of coherent understanding.

The image becomes a presence without a point of focus.

…

For memory to take shape, it requires thresholds, a beginning, and an end.
Within the flow we now inhabit, what remains is a diffuse, unbounded trace.

Sontag writes that “compassion is an unstable emotion; it needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Within the flow of images, empathy dissolves into the next one.

Some persist without mediation. Others fade despite their intensity.

What remains does not follow a logic of importance, but a logic of persistence within the flow.

Faced with this saturation, the mind sometimes resorts to displacement or partial erasure.

In both cases, it is not a lack of importance that is at stake, but an excess of exposure.

The image does not disappear.

But neither does it take hold.

Hence, the emergence of another position: the refusal to look.

Some images, through repetition, exhaust their own meaning or reproduce the violence they carry.

Yet this refusal offers no clear way out: to withhold images from view does not negate their existence, nor does it halt their effects.

What are we to do with this accumulation of collapsing buildings?
With these mutilated animals?

With these villages, sometimes familiar, that now appear as the remnants of a post-apocalyptic landscape?

For some, looking is a class privilege: those who look can do so because they are alive, because they are safe. Those buried beneath the rubble have become the image.

Others believe that we now live inside an image, reproduced without us.

Still others argue that looking is itself a political act: that we, as living witnesses, participate in the making of catastrophe, its extension, its archiving.

And yet, nothing endures.

We feel very little. Because we have grown accustomed to looking.

Perhaps the catastrophe, the only real one, resides precisely there: in our growing accustomedness to the visible.