On Photographing Pain
Who could have the courage to see—and keep believing?
“Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? ― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Bonnya’s eyes sparkled as she skipped through her village in the tea-fields in Northern Bangladesh holding her friends’ hands. Dressed in bold red and purple colours, she led us home. We met her younger brother, Sukumar and father, Kanai, inside their bare-brick-walled, dark home, with few windows and doors, and tragically, a home now missing a mother. I was squinting to see. A simple sack of food of some kind was stacked against one of the walls. There was no furniture – one single mat, no electricity, no water, just moulded earth giving shade and shelter. Bonnya’s little brother was smiling and laughing for most of our visit, his dimples were pockets of tiny shadows on the curve of his shining cheeks. As Kanai reclined against the brick wall, stretching his legs out in from of him towards us, I noticed his naked feet, lacerated, bleeding and covered in boils, swollen from untreated infection.
How would I photograph Kanai with dignity? If I focussed too much on his feet then open wounds may define his whole body, and in listening, physical pain was not the loudest part of this family’s story.
It would be easy for me to cut his feet from the frame. I could focus on the strength of his back and shoulders and the way his arms guided his children to sit or stand or the way his protective eyes glanced around to see what his children were doing. Cutting hands and feet from a frame looks visually abrupt or can look like a technical mistake.
But here were the feet of a father who loved his children. Here were the feet of a father that were still standing, still walking, still providing for his family. Here were the feet of a man who had walked paths that I would never walk. Here were feet that were tools used up for others, not manicured or curated.
Our hands and feet share so much of our stories by showing so little. Our toes, fingers, wrists, and ankles can expose comfort, longing, awkwardness, peace, pain.
Photographers, photography critics and image theorists have, for decades, considered the juxtaposition of beauty and suffering. As a communications professional in the humanitarian sector, I spend a lot of time thinking about when, how and why we witness – or see, or watch – another’s suffering (I’m also plugging away at a book manuscript on the topic too).
Should the bleakness of pain – especially someone else’s pain — mix with the thrill of light or colour, inseparably, inside a frame? Especially if the frame doesn’t ‘belong’ to the same body that the pain belongs to? If so, for what purpose?
These questions have existed as long as photography and image-making have. The answers are complex, but most photographers and image-makers will have their own views on the discussion. Of course - there are also times when images must remain untaken. I hope my views don’t stay fixed but are influenced by the people I meet and each person’s unique circumstances.
There lots of images which inspire my thoughts on the discussion. Here, I’ll discuss two different images taken by the same photographer which help me consider and reconsider my answers to these questions. Both images were taken by American photographer Eugene William Smith. One showed a body in crisis, one resulted from a body in crisis. One was dramatically stark, one was mysterious – poetic, universal.
Eugene Smith is probably most well-known for his photo, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath. The photograph caught the world’s attention in TIME magazine on 2 June 1972, highlighting the devastation caused by Minamata disease – a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning in a city in Japan. Industrial wastewater containing methyl mercury from a chemical factory claimed thousands of lives, while the corporation responsible (and the government) did almost nothing to prevent the pollution.1
Tomoko was one of over two thousand victims of this poisoning. (Although later research states that the effects of the industrial pollution lasted longer and spread further than first believed, affecting tens of thousands of people.) Tomoko had been poisoned while she had been developing in her mother’s womb, saving her mother and siblings from further effects of the disease. She was born blind, deaf and paralysed and died at just 21 years old.
The image is hauntingly beautiful. Inside a traditional Japanese bathroom, mother Ryoko cradles her daughter, Tomoko. Tomoko’s eyes are illuminated by the 3pm light as she looks upwards – heavenwards. Her bony body is edged by light, and her skeletal limbs stretch almost the full width of the frame. The edges of the bathtub frame their relationship in this moment: the carer and the cared for, the helper and the helpless. This mother gazing at her child resonates with the timeless embrace of Mary and Jesus, Madonna and child. It feels deeply intimate. It feels ethereal. It feels dramatic. It feels almost other-worldly and yet sickeningly painful.
How would I feel if my sister, my father, or my child was photographed like this? This is the question I ask myself in situations where taking a photograph seems like a brash insensitivity or intrusion, albeit one with full consent. How would I feel if this photo was shared with everyone I knew, and then a whole crowd of strangers? I look at Tomoko, and I wonder.
It was an image for which Ryoko gave her full consent. This was an image she wanted Eugene to create and to share. It was an image made collaboratively, directed by both the participant and photographer. But it was also only an image – two-dimensional. Why is Tomoko sick? What disease is she suffering from? Who is this lady caring for her? The image doesn’t give us answers, even though, through other photographs and words, Smith did address some of these questions.
Smith wasn’t alone in his wrestle with the ethics of photographing the effects of Minamata disease—a type of mercury poisoning—during the 1950s and 60s. Many photographers represented the effects of this disease to advocate for justice for the victims. Japanese filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki visited Minamata in 1965 and grappled with the same questions.2 Should the victims of this tragedy be shown as beautiful? Could he film subjects who were unconscious or unable to express their approval?
In fact, Japanese photographers and filmmakers working in Minamata around the same time as Smith, including Tsuchimoto, criticised Smith’s photo, especially the fact that he had photographed a naked teenage girl, unable to give her own consent.
What Smith’s single freeze frame doesn’t show is that thousands of the disease’s victims were shunned in their communities for two reasons. The victims were either assumed to be contagious (How can an image show invisible prejudice?) or they were thought to be tarnishing the reputation of this picturesque landscape through their legal cases. These photos showed that beyond the stunning landscape there was a toxic pain – an invisible poison was infiltrating the land. Eugene’s photo made the effects of this poison visible to a global audience. His photos exposed the inaction of the very authorities who had the power to also protect.
The timeline is important to note. The Chisso factory first started producing methyl mercury as a by-product in 1951, although some reports say earlier. In May 1956 – five years later – the factory’s hospital director reported the discovery of the disease. By October 1956, 40 patients had been discovered, 14 of whom had died: a mortality rate of 36.7%.3
So, this was not news in 1972 when Smith’s photos were published in Time magazine. And looking at the statistics of human-caused disasters which occurred during 1956 and 1972, the Minamata poisoning was not the deadliest. The Nigerian Civil War, Congo Crisis, the North Yemen Civil war, and the Papuan conflict all happened during this window of time; the Papuan conflict continues today. Smith’s photo acted as a rallying reminder that justice had not been served; albeit a belated reminder.
Eugene Smith had not been the only long-term activist challenging Chisso corporation. From 1971 to 1973 (before, during and after the publication of Smith’s photos), Japanese man Teruo Kawamoto, a patient of the disease, orchestrated sit-in campaigns, setting up tent near the Chisso corporate headquarters. Many locals joined him.
It’s good to remember that while one single photo may have brought global awareness, the multiplicity of local, smaller actions were just as valuable in effecting change.
Although Eugene was not the only activist, it was largely his photos which sparked action around the world to help the Minamata community. Governments began creating policies and standards to increase seafood quality and to protect consumers from mercurial poisoning and Minamata’s disease. Tomoko’s photo also helped usher in an era of heightened environmental consciousness as citizens worldwide began realizing the connection between pollution prevention and human health. Smith’s activism led the Chisso Corporation and their employees to believe that an intervention was needed.
In 1973 – 22 years after the first official report of the disease – Chisso was found guilty of negligence, and comprehensive compensation payments began to the victims. Of course, this was only financial compensation; lives had been lost, families had mourned, communities had been tainted forever. But it was compensation of some kind. It was recognition. The victims were being seen and assured that their lives mattered, although their circumstances may have suggested otherwise.
The direct impact of this photo on Tomoko’s family was mixed, however, and towards the end of Tomoko’s life, almost wholly negative. The photo fuelled rumours that Tomoko’s family were financially profiting from the image. They asked that the photograph be withdrawn from further publication, twenty years after her death in 1997. ‘I wanted Tomoko to be laid to rest,’ her father said.
Aileen Smith, Eugene’s wife, who had lived in Minamata for years, said around this time:
Photography is neither medicine nor god, and the photograph … in spite of its release worldwide, could not cure Tomoko’s illness … Needless to say, after Tomoko's death, this photograph meant something different. It wasn’t about Tomoko anymore …4
I am grateful for Aileen’s words. She accepts the limits of a photograph to directly treat, cure or rescue somebody. This documented moment is – after all – merely a mirror reflection of a moment in time. What an image can’t do, she implies, is what a human, or God can do. She accepts the photograph’s meaning has shifted over time. She accepts that the original purpose of an image can be twisted.
After her husband passed away, Aileen also said,
‘This photograph would mean nothing if it did not honour Tomoko. This photograph would be a profanity if it continued to be issued against the will of Tomoko and her family. Because this was a statement about Tomoko’s life, it must honour that life and by it her death.’5
There are words in here which I try to hold to.
A photo means nothing to if it doesn’t honour the person it represents.
A photo cannot be issued against the will of the person it represents.
A photo has the power to be a statement about someone’s life, so it must honour that life, even beyond death. To honour Tomoko’s life was to stop publishing the image.
Here, I come to talk about a second photo of Eugene Smith’s, which helps me think about the relevance of beauty in representations of suffering. Taken in the spring of 1946, the photograph The Walk to Paradise Garden was one of Smith’s first photographs after he was severely wounded during World War Two. Caught in Japanese mortar fire, his wounds left him with shrapnel in his skull and left hand. He was unable to hold a camera for months. The Walk to Paradise Garden was the first image he took as he was recovering from his injuries.
It shows two small children walking ahead, framed by trees, pictured from behind. They seem to be holding hands and are emerging from the shadowy undergrowth onto a more well-lit path. The children look ordinary, unremarkable even, but the beauty of the light and shadow and framing are shimmering, almost magically. It is quietly intimate in a different way to Tomoko’s photo. Its intimacy is simple. Its universality is tangible.
As I look, just as I looked at the photo of Tomoko, I am aware that the power of three people intertwines in any form of image-making. Firstly, the person being represented. If this person is poor, oppressed, silenced (or even silent, like Tomoko) there is a heightened weight of power and privilege on the other two people in this trinity.
The second is the photographer, who is close in proximity to the person being represented. The photographer is likely well resourced (as they probably own the camera) and there is a chance they are not facing the same depth or shape of suffering as the person pictured.
Then, there is the viewer: someone separated by distance, race, social class or culture to the person pictured. The viewer is distanced but brought closer to the scene through the image.
There will be times when the person inside the frame is hurting. There will be times when, we, the viewers are also victims of pain or poverty. The recent Israel-Hamas war and our reliance on citizen journalism in a place where no other journalists can enter, has shown us that the image-makers suffer too. “I’m not just covering the news – I’m living it,’ said Plestia Alaqad.
I have come to realise there will never be a perfect equilibrium of power within this trinity. But that also doesn’t have to be a bad thing. A power imbalance may exist, but excess power doesn’t need to be wielded; excess power isn’t always bad. Afterall, only ‘power without love is reckless and abusive,’ said Martin Luther King Jr.
Despite his limitations, I believe that Eugene Smith created the image of Tomoko and her mother with love and care, not with recklessness.
The Walk to Paradise Garden displays another power imbalance between adult and child, yet the photo has a timeless beauty to it. We have seen these scenes in our own lives; children curiously exploring trees and bushes. It’s as if we’re somehow invited to follow and we watch from a distance. Smith said of the photo:
As I followed my children through the underbrush and tall trees – what joy of discovery everywhere was theirs – and as I watched, I knew again that in spite of all of it, and in spite of every way, and over every setback, that today, now, I wished to speak out a sonnet for life and of the worth of continuing and living in it. (1954)
Smith’s eyes had been tarnished by war, and his body was now broken by it. However, this scene restored him in a mysterious way. I wonder if he was holding this memory – of both pain and healing – his own children in his mind, when he met someone else’s child, Tomoko, in Minimata years later.
It is these two images next to each other which somehow begin to answer the question I asked earlier about pain and beauty living inside the same frame. Both Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath and The Walk to Paradise Garden were taken by the same person, almost twenty years apart. One shows Tomoko, a child bathed in light, depleted, and needlessly dying. Another shows his own children, Pat and Juanita, stepping into light at the end of a shadowy tunnel, adventuring. One is a harsh rally cry to empathy and to action, the other is a quieter reflection on ordinary life. One is another’s experience; one is our own. One was made to benefit the life of another; one was made for himself. Both images reveal both pain and beauty in different measures, in different ways.
The effects of Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath effects rippled far beyond Minamata, but The Walk to Paradise Garden was deeply personal – ‘however unimportant to the world.’ One was made in a position of privilege and health; one was made at a time of helplessness and pain. ‘I tried to … ignore the sudden violence of pain that … shot again and again through my hand,’ Smith says of the moment he took The Walk to Paradise Garden.
There are more uncontextualized images in our world than ever before, but both of Smith’s images, in their beauty, reveal a little bit of what it means to be human; to have or to lose power, to witness and to feel pain, to illuminate a large-scale injustice or appreciate the tiny, pleasing moments of daily life.
Here is what I am sure of: both kinds of images are needed. Both kinds of images hold their own limitations. Both images involve the photographed, the viewer, the photographer in highly imperfect ways. Both kinds of images serve a purpose, both images have a season of relevance and honesty.
I wished to speak out a sonnet for life and of the worth of continuing and living in it.
I cried when I first read these words. There is only so much pain someone can feel inside their body or witness outside of their body before hope begins to fade. I’ve felt that lately, watching war.
If photographs can make us feel more human and less like God then they are essential. If we are looking, we wont always see the ‘transfiguration’ that Robinson talks of in the opening quote above, but we might. Can images bringing peace during conflict, alleviate poverty or heal pain? I believe there is still a chance they can.
If images can show us that there are dancing dimples not far from wounded feet, then we need them more than ever.
Thank you for this thoughtful essay. And the Gilead quote is perfect.
this is a beautiful piece, thank you