On Tuesday, in a dramatic and furious speech to the United Nations Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy presented graphic atrocity photographs from Bucha — including close-ups of dead children and clumps of corpses, some with their hands tied behind their backs. “The chamber fell silent,” the New York Times reported, and the photographs ricocheted around the world. Almost immediately, the European Commission proposed to cut off coal imports from Russia and President Joe Biden vowed additional sanctions.
The pictures, apparently, had done their job.
But images can’t make political decisions. Photographs can’t do our thinking for us, though sometimes they can nudge us a bit. It is doubtful that the Bucha photographs will significantly alter the course of the war. What they can do and have done is strengthen a political will that already existed — what the photography critic Susan Sontag called “a relevant political consciousness” — to fight Russia’s aggression. They echo the already deep sense of outrage and revulsion, on the part of governments and ordinary citizens, toward the war and those who launched it. The images tell us something that, in a sense, we already knew.
