Powerful Images

Studying these photos has engendered in me a sense of sadness. Despite the fact that sadness is kind of a lame emotion and there are thousands of better sounding descriptions, it is none the less what I feel. The photo of the lynching of Rubin Stacy shows a black man hanged from a tree with four little girls looking on with casualness, like lynchings were not a disturbing occurrence, but rather commonplace. Immediately I thought of schoolteacher from Beloved teaching his students to categorize the slaves of Sweet Home as both human and animals. In both the novel and the photo show the impressionability of young children. The young girls in the picture clearly see nothing wrong with a man hanging from a tree, and likewise schoolteacher’s students had no morally queries about classifying human beings as animals. It is heart wrenching to see the cruelty and disconcern for people who are of another race being passed down from generation to generation, from student to teacher, from mentor to follower.
In novels one can get a sense of a characters feelings and reactions to situations, while pictures present the viewer with a clear image in their head. In many instances photographs are much more powerful than a novel. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that photos leave nothing to the imagination, because that is simply not true. Photos can misrepresent a situation very easily, usually by a misleading caption. Photos put stark images into our minds, while reading a novel can leave room for interpretation of what the author is trying to present the reader. As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

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