This article contains images that some may finding distressing, including of torture.
“Images are worth a thousand words. These images may be worth a million.” US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s response to being shown graphic images of the victims of Hamas’s recent massacre raises an important question about whether photographs are more powerful than words in conveying the brutality of war.
Since the announcement of its invention in 1839, photography has been imagined as a form of “writing with light” (referring to the meanings of the Greek words phos and graphe from which it is derived).
