I’m in a crisis. It is a creative one, but, per the usual, one that bleeds into many aspects of my life. Amid these moments, I’ve tried to work it out through creativity, the art making in reflection of its maker's state, but that hasn’t been feeling right. I need to get some things off my chest. 

At the heart of what I’m trying to comprehend stems from my previous essay, “Why Intent Matters.” In it, I state that the intent of an artist is the cornerstone for our understanding of their motives, the ability to read their work, and its purpose. While posing such a proposition I feel, and have felt, resolved in my perception and understanding of my intentions as an artist. However, to rest the perception and meaning solely on the intent of the creative endeavor is self-indulgent and naive. What about the audience, those who engage with your intention? How do they understand what you do and why you do it? What happens relationally between the creator, the artist, and the world around them?

This feeling towards the digestion of visual material by both myself and others was fueled in 2020 with the death of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter protest, and the engagements that began a resurgence to consider those left out of cultural, social, political, and economic systems with the United States. During this period, we protested, screamed, made space and proclaimed we would finally be seen. We took part in a variety of strategies against systems that had been denying our voices and lives. With the COVID pandemic in full swing, and over a decade of social media savvy under our belts, we used visual material as a major component of protest. To be active in protest was equal to being engaged with showing, posting, and critiquing online.

As I navigated and engaged in active forms of advocacy and activism, both online and in real life, I kept reflecting on two books that I read during my undergraduate studies at Columbia College Chicago. The first was Susan Sontag’s Regarding The Pain Of Others and the second was Walter Benjamin's Photography In The Age of Reproduction. Sontag presents the effects of seeing acts of violence and death through media and visual forms, and how this act numbs our sense of violence and death. She writes, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing ‘we’ can do — but who is that ‘we’? — and nothing ‘they’ can do either — and who are ‘they’? — then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.” (Sontag, "Regarding The Pain Of Others")

Sontag argues that the constant exposure to images of suffering, war, and atrocity through various media channels leads to a desensitization among viewers. This desensitization numbs our emotional response but it also picks away at our moral and empathetic capabilities. When we are inundated with images of suffering and death, the initial shock and horror fade and is replaced by a passive acceptance. This process, Sontag suggests, can lead to dangerous apathy, where the sheer volume of horrific images renders us incapable of responding to them with the appropriate level of concern or action.

Sontag highlights the ethical dilemma of viewing such images. The act of looking at someone else's pain especially in a detached manner raises questions about our role as spectators. Are we merely voyeurs, consuming the suffering of others for our own emotional or intellectual stimulation? This voyeuristic consumption can create a sense of distance and otherness, where the pain and suffering are seen as events happening to "others" and not something that demands our intervention or empathy.

In Walter Benjamin’s text, he states, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.” (Benjamin, "Photography In The Age of Reproduction")

Walter Benjamin’s essay looks at how the reproduction of images through print media allows us to see events through images of the world outside of our direct locality. This act dislodges us from a nuanced understanding of the things that we see, and it creates a disconnect between what we see and why we see it. We might be living in the USA and see a news article with an image of a soldier in Ukraine, but we can’t understand the complexities of what has brought that soldier to fight. To understand that soldier’s reasoning, we rely solely on context given to us by an author with their agenda and biases. That soldier's story becomes the same as the author's agenda, regardless if it is true or not.

Benjamin's insight into the nature of mechanical reproduction also touches upon the erosion of the "aura" of the original work. When images are mass-produced, they lose their unique presence and authenticity, transforming into mere copies devoid of their original context. This decontextualization leads to a superficial engagement with the images, where viewers are detached from the reality they represent. The ubiquity of reproduced images results in a homogenized perception of diverse events, flattening the complexities and nuances that define them. This detachment not only impairs our ability to fully grasp the underlying causes and implications of these events but also makes us susceptible to the influence of dominant narratives and ideologies. Consequently, our understanding becomes fragmented and distorted, shaped more by the medium of representation than by the actualities of the events themselves.