Both examples use the best of new technologies to reach the biggest possible audience. These images provide a snapshot through the post-modern viewfinder and bring into focus the evident moral ambiguity. An image is a frame that captures within it the details of a moment without any contextual information.
Should people be able to view horrific images from war zones? Do they provide some perspective on the death and horrors of war or do they simply feed into the odd human trait for voyeurism?
History contains many examples of images that have brought truth and light to dark and lethal situations. Picasso's Guernica is one. The photo of the Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm is another. These images have been branded into the social memory of successive generations as symbols of what war means to those caught in its deadly machinery.
World War I took place in a time when it was relatively easy to control images from the frontline. It was not the media but the official letters notifying families in towns and villages across the Commonwealth of the deaths of sons and fathers that alerted the general public to the huge loss of life on the Western Front.
Reaction to the war in Vietnam was undoubtedly influenced by media images that portrayed the uncensored reality. If these images had not been available would the widespread activism and protests against this war have occurred?
Now graphic pictures of a man being beheaded have raised the debate about what constitutes gratuitous use to a new level. Do the horrors portrayed reinforce compassion and empathy or simply distance us from the reality of such events?
The images of celebrities stolen/hacked from their personal files is simply theft pretending to be some vague notion of freedom within the internet.
If someone entered your house and took your photo album, you would call the police. If someone steals film, music or a book you have toiled to create that is theft.
If someone else opens the door to allow the thief inside, then that must surely make them as complicit as the robber.
All those who had a part in stealing the celebrity photos are equally at fault and we should not play their silly game and gawk at the pictures. True, celebrities and social media have a strange mutually beneficial arrangement most of the time but providing access to pictures of famous persons in a state of undress, without their permission is simply wrong.
We should not connive with such duplicity as it makes us equally as guilty as those who posted them.
Terry Sarten is a Wanganui-based writer, musician and social worker. Feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz
