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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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IMAGES '92, Page 46Unforgettable pictures of the year
We know that images can hold history in place. We forget
sometimes that they can also drive it forward. In 1992 Los
Angeles exploded over the meaning of pictures of a black man
being beaten by white police. And it was pictures -- of spectral
women and withered children -- that launched the rescue mission
in Somalia. It may have been awkward to have cameras meet the
troops when they landed, but wasn't it also appropriate? In a
sense it was cameras that had sent them there.
This was a year that disproved the truism that scenes of
tragedy all blur together, that photographs of famine in Biafra
and Ethiopia, Sudan and then Somalia just pile on in layers,
forming a callous around the conscience. Brought face to face
one more time with starvation, the world did not just shrug. And
pictures gave other conflicts their own unforgettable faces.
Some of the video-game visuals from last year's fighting in the
Persian Gulf were strangely antiseptic, an invitation to forget
that war is the mass production of individual suffering. The
photographs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where war has become serial
killing under the guise of politics, made us remember.
Images are an imperfect route to knowledge. They crowd the
senses; they can simplify; they can yell. But they make an
impact that sets in motion the deeper operations of judgment.
The secular faith of the 20th century insists that history is
progress, that time's arrow points the human race towards an
ever brighter future. Then the world dissolves again into tribal
bloodletting, and we wonder whether history is cyclical, always
orbiting through the same thickets of hope and misfortune. When
we look at news photographs, we bring to them the questions that
history forces upon us: What should we think of human affairs?
What is to be done? Pictures don't tell us the answers. They
tell us why the questions are important.