There is a photograph that shadows me, entering my imagination at inappropriate moments. It originally appeared in the August 2000 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, accompanying an article by Sebastian Junger called "The Terror of Sierra Leone," which reported from the frontline of a notably fierce and barbaric civil war. The article promised to present "new evidence of the cold-blooded calculation that fuels the rebels' insanity," a claim whose sensationalism made me bristle but whose accuracy I could not deny. The photo was taken by Teun Voeten, a Dutch photojournalist who had first come to Sierra Leone in 1998 and had previously covered the wars in Sarajevo and Kosovo.

The picture shows a girl named Memuna Mansarah. She is three years old, and was living in a refugee camp in Freetown. Memuna has plump cheeks, short fuzzy hair, and large, clear black eyes that stare not quite at us, but slightly upward (Voeten may have been standing when he took the picture): Something has caught her attention. She is almost smiling, as if, rather than being amused, she is considering being amused. Memuna is wearing a clean, frilly, sleeveless white dress that contrasts sharply with her deep-black skin; her left ear sports a little gold earring. She is clutching what looks like a large piece of soft bread in her tiny left hand with its tiny fingernails. Her right arm, hacked off just above the elbow by her compatriots in the inaptly named Revolutionary United Front, is a short stump that bulges out slightly toward its base. A journalist who has reported from Sierra Leone told me last year that Memuna has been adopted by an American family.

I have looked at this photo many times, thought about it, written about it, but I am still not sure how to do these things nor, certainly, how to do them right. My thoughts and feelings about the photograph have changed in various ways over time, but the more that happens, the more an underlying desolation-my helplessness before Memuna-becomes hard to escape. In a chapter of her book Ordinary Vices-a chapter called "Putting Cruelty First"-the political philosopher Judith Shklar explicates some of the problems this photo presents for me:


Yet in certain ways, we evade rather than answer Shklar's questions by looking at Memuna, because Memuna is a three-year-old child and therefore as close to pure victimhood as anyone on Earth. Children present us with certain moral absolutes (indeed, these may be the only absolutes that remain in an ever-more-relativistic world): Is there anyone who believes, or at least would publicly profess, that a child "deserves" to be hungry, to be terrorized, to be tortured, to die? Memuna is a victim of circumstance but she is no victimizer, and the drama of cruelty in which she finds herself is surely not mutual. That's why her photograph is not just painful but perplexing-and why photographs of violated children are among the most problematic images of suffering.

LOOKING AT THIS photograph four years ago, I felt angry. Anger, first, at the sadists who did this to Memuna, and who I knew had done the same to tens of thousands of others. But I felt anger also at Teun Voeten, and at Sebastian Junger, and at the editors of Vanity Fair. For my rage against the perpetrators turned into pity for Memuna, and my pity led to a new anger at feeling manipulated by the photo. What could I do with my pity, which felt so shamefully obedient? I dislike pity, and I dislike manipulation, and my dislike of my pity (which was now self-pity) became, increasingly, the focus of my reaction to this photograph. It was only later that I realized I was acting out, almost precisely, John Berger's prediction of many years before: He had written that, when looking at an image of political violence (in his case the Vietnam War), the shock of the photograph makes it seem "discontinuous with all other moments. . . . But the reader who has been arrested by the photograph may tend to feel this discontinuity as his own personal moral inadequacy. And as soon as this happens even his sense of shock is dispersed: his own moral inadequacy may now shock him as much as the crimes being committed in the war." (Berger suggested that the viewer solve this paradox by confronting her own lack of political freedom rather than the suffering of others, which I suspect he thought would then lead to revolution.)

Pity has a bad reputation among many moral philosophers and moral thinkers, and for good reason. Shklar described pity as "often mean-spirited." Hannah Arendt posited that Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor sought to rob mankind of freedom not out of hatred, but from pity. Primo Levi, who knew cruelty firsthand, knew, too, that pity and kindness are worlds apart; thus he observed of the guards at Auschwitz: "[P]ity. . . grows quite well if ably cultivated, particularly in the primitive minds of . . . those very brutes who have no scruples about beating us up without a reason, or treading our faces into the ground." (Levi's work is also, however, a warning against a pitiless world.) Most of us have learned of pity's severe shortcomings from our own, far more mundane experiences. Anyone who has been the object of pity, even if only fleetingly, discovers how it breeds resentment (or worse), for pity creates a top-down relation in which the power of the superior is predicated on the impotence of the inferior, all subsumed under the maddening guise of "goodness." Precisely by sustaining the distance between the privileged and the needy, and by dividing people into subjects and objects, pity can too easily become cruelty rather than its antidote.

Against pity Arendt posed compassion, which seeks to bridge rather than maintain divisions. Again, most of us know, from the intimate stories of our lives, the ways in which compassion is both more encompassing and more specific than pity, how it hints at an I-thou relation rather than a hierarchical one. Compassion does not suggest an absolute equality of experience or of pain, but it does acknowledge the contingency of a shared human condition. (Human precisely, and only, to the extent that it is shared.) Compassion says, Though you are suffering now, I had my turn in the past and may again in the future. Compassion says, There is nothing alien about you-not your pain, not your powerlessness, not even your degradation. Compassion says, The differences between us are not essential ones of power, morality, or nature but simply (though crucially) of time, place, and luck. And whereas pity thrives on the victim's weakness, compassion affirms her dignity. Arendt called compassion a kind of "co-suffering," though she added that "it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant."

Above both pity and compassion Arendt placed solidarity which, she rightly noted, is not a feeling but a principle through which men and women create an objective "community of interest with the oppressed and exploited." Solidarity! It still has a nobility that inspires; it still maintains the hope that a powerful human connection will sweep away divisions of nation, race, class; it still promises that the deepest wounds of history can be healed. Against fragmentation, it posits unity; against loneliness, brotherhood; against abandonment, support; against weakness, strength. How many demonstrations have we been to, how many posters have we read, how many petitions have we signed, all urging solidarity-or even boldly boasting that it has already been achieved? And yet: We live in the anxious beginnings of the twenty-first century and have witnessed the blasted hopes of the twentieth, and some of us have learned that solidarity is a difficult thing-far harder to attain in imperfect practice than to dictate in glorious rhetoric. What would it mean to create solidarity with Memuna Mansarah? And can Teun Voeten's photograph, or anyone's, help us do so?

THE ANGER I felt upon looking at Memuna places me in good company, or rather a lot of company. Indeed, anger-or perhaps ressentiment-seems to be an increasingly common reaction of viewers in the privileged world when looking at victims of war, humanitarian disasters, or poverty. The work of James Nachtwey, who has photographed in virtually every late-twentieth-century hellhole (Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, Sudan), seems to attract this kind of negative attention most viscerally. His 2000 exhibit called "Inferno" became a lightning rod of antipathy for critics even (or especially) from liberal publications such as the Village Voice and the New Yorker, who seemed vastly irritated to be looking at unpleasant images of starving, mutilated, utterly defeated people. (A critic for the Voice posed a strange question: "If we don't send a check to Oxfam after a visit with these ghosts, are we complicit in their terrible lives?") These critics do not like what such photographs show.

But there's another, equally strong critical response to images of atrocity: anger at what photographs don't show, cannot show, and will never show. This critical tradition, developed most eloquently by Susan Sontag and John Berger, argues that because photographs lack narratives, they lack meaning-especially political and moral meaning, which is contingent on causation. Therefore, these critics claim, photographs of suffering-by freezing a moment of time, by extracting experience from context, by separating the event from its history-actually depoliticize, desensitize, and perhaps even dehumanize us, though their makers surely strive for the opposite. These critics do not like what such photographs fail to show.

With photographs of suffering children these two critical traditions, these two responses, and these two accusations of insufficiency merge. Because children are vulnerable, blameless-such pure victims-depictions of their suffering have an extraordinarily visceral impact (and should). At the same time, photographs of children are no more "meaningful"-that is, politically or morally resonant-than any others, though they call forth Pavlovian responses of pity and outrage that are simultaneously irresistible and subconscious. Indeed, the disseminators of such photographs often aim for precisely such responses.

Take, for instance, a photograph that was circulated on antiwar leaflets in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq last year; it was thrust into my hand, and I assume into thousands of others, more than once on the street in New York. The leaflet showed a photograph of a grotesquely emaciated Iraqi child along with the headline (and I paraphrase), "End the Sanctions Now!"

The clear implication of the photograph combined with the slogan was that sanctions were causing Iraqi children to starve; to oppose ending the sanctions was therefore to support killing children. The problem here is that one could argue that it was not sanctions per se but, rather, Saddam Hussein's theft of the oil-for-food money that had led to starvation among his youngest citizens. Of course, the debate over sanctions could not definitively determine where one stood on the war (though it is possible to argue that the overthrow of Saddam was a pro-child act-especially if, say, the child in question is Kurdish). The point, though, is that the photograph-cum-slogan was designed to stop any thought process, any internal debate, any building of an argument within the viewer and to create instead precisely two emotions-revulsion and guilt-that could then be alleviated by precisely one action: opposing the sanctions. I threw this leaflet away in disgust each time I received it.

Photographs of suffering children, then, though they ostensibly appeal to our noblest-that is, our most altruistic and protective-selves, are in fact perfectly suited to the uses of manipulation, vulgar simplification, and propaganda. In this sense they not only depict violence, but are a form of violence-an assault on the viewer's capacity to form considered judgments. And this is so especially in contexts where people have little access to diverse viewpoints, or are illiterate. What is one to make of the fact, for instance, that newspapers and television stations throughout the Arab world frequently, indeed obsessively, display the goriest images of Palestinian and Iraqi children: scalps torn off, mangled limbs streaming blood, bodies writhing in unanswerable agony if not yet dead? This is, I would suggest, not an attempt to foster political understanding, defend the defenseless, or foment political change but their opposite-a lurid, almost neo-Expressionist stirring of enraged but repetitive revenge fantasies that is the antithesis of political maturity, much less empowerment. Like all obsessive iterations, it calls into question what is not being said, or asked, or thought about.

In contrast, the Israeli media, which are far freer and more contentious than any in the Arab world, abjure printing or broadcasting explicit photographs of the victims of Palestinian suicide-bombers. Such restraint is not based in neutrality or objectivity, and should not be confused with either delicacy or forgiveness. It derives, rather, from a modern conception of what it means to make politics-of what, that is, it means to solve a man-made problem (even an impossible one) rather than avenge an existential crime. The former requires sober reason and prosaic compromise, which are hard to achieve when staring at dead children; the latter requires unremitting fury and grandiose dreams, which are hard to refuse when staring at dead children.

Yet it is not only the Arab world's media that are partial-all media are. And it is not only photographs of children that are easily manipulative-all photographs are. What to do, then, with these half-life images, these beleaguered fragments of reality, so dreadfully flawed yet so undeniably powerful? One could, perhaps, seek to banish photographs altogether, or banish them from one's immediate world-a Taliban-like approach. But this seems to create more problems than it solves. In its place, every viewer who cares about approaching photographs (and the people in them) as something other than a sponge must devise personal, inevitably inadequate, ways of seeing.

FOR MYSELF, I try, increasingly though inexpertly, to counteract the inherent limitations of the photograph by envisioning the mirror world, the invisible world, the dialectical twins of each photograph that I see, or at least that I look at carefully. This has nothing to do with the notion that "every story has two sides"-indeed I hope, and expect, that every story has more than two sides (though not necessarily morally equivalent or equally truthful ones). It means, though, that to understand a photograph one must move outside it, entering the realm of the not-seen. On the most immediate level, this means that I imagine the photographs of dead Israeli children I have never viewed when I look at the photographs of dead Palestinian children that I often have. This is not because I am "halving the difference," which would be both grotesque and impossible. It is because these photographs, which is to say the historic conflicts that created them, are inextricably joined: They can be severed only in the image-world, not the real one.

I try, too, to expand the immediacy of the photograph-an immediacy that is the source of its greatest strength and weakness-to encompass the past it can never show but that is somehow always present. Thus, when I see photographs of child-victims of the Iraq War, I think about the immense but often undocumented suffering in the Iraq of the Baath that preceded last year's invasion. (The more horrific the photo, the more difficult though necessary this becomes. Think, for instance, of the widely circulated image of twelve-year-old Ali Ismail Abbas as he lay bandaged in his hospital bed, arms blown off by U.S. bombs, a bleak smile-or was it a grimace?-on his face.) Again, this is not an attempt to "balance out" the pre- and postwar scales of misery-how would that be?-but rather to remember that suffering doesn't start when a camera records it, that violence doesn't begin when an "intervention" does, and that history doesn't commence when we notice it.

To see a photograph clearly, then, means to look at what it does not show-at the subterranean world of events, causality, choice, and contingency that preceded, and created, the particular image that has caught one's attention. In looking at Memuna, we need to explore Sierra Leone's backslide into nihilism, which took place in full view of a generally uncaring world for more than a decade. We need to understand how a country turned against itself in a paroxysm of cruelty, abetted by certain nations who had a stake in its implosion and ignored by others who thought they didn't. We need to consider the failure of modernity, of colonialism, and of postcolonial independence too (so much accumulated failure!). We need to probe the complicity of the West in Sierra Leone's self-destruction-and the limits of that complicity. We need to think on the meta-level about sadism and the politics (actually anti-politics) of thanatos, and on a specific level about the British intervention in Sierra Leone and what we, as members of the developed world, can learn from its successes for the future.

To attain such knowledge and even understanding, to forge a political position that is avowed in the present and whose lessons will, one hopes, be used wisely: This is the beginning, however inadequate, of solidarity with Memuna. It falls short, I fear, of Arendt's community, and certainly of Berger's revolution. But it makes the claim that our responsibility toward Memuna, and our connection to her, do not stop at feeling bad, or indeed at feeling; and it is predicated on the belief that we should use, rather than guiltily disown, the implacable fact that we have more power than she.

This solidarity cannot develop within the photograph that we stare at; it depends on the world outside the frame. To understand Memuna's hint of a smile, we must travel far from her in the hope of return-bearing neither justice nor salvation nor the impossible righting of a wrong, yet something more than bewildered pity for her past and her future.

Susie Linfield, who writes for the Los Angeles Times Book Review and other publications, is the acting director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at New York University.

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