A very different project is ‘‘War Primer 2’’ (2011), by the artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Like Shields, Broomberg and Chanarin make use of appropriated imagery. In their case, it is actually an appropriation of an appropriation: ‘‘War Primer 2’’ is based on Bertolt Brecht’s ‘‘Kriegsfibel’’ (‘‘War Primer,’’ 1955), a book of press photographs, largely culled from newspapers and magazines from the previous decades, that Brecht captioned with bitter, poetic quatrains.

For their update, Broomberg and Chanarin have pasted photographs associated with the global war on terror, downloaded from the Internet, into Brecht’s book, layering them directly onto his original images. The new photos, as visceral, graphic and sometimes plainly horrific as the old ones, include scenes of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, Saddam Hussein’s execution, the White House during the mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush serving soldiers at Thanksgiving. Alongside Brecht’s lines, the images become an uncanny indictment of American conduct in these recent wars, but also a lament about the evil of war in general.

The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction. This is what Brecht meant in 1931 when he wrote, ‘‘The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter.’’ What then are we to do with this devious tool? One option is to resist the depiction of violence, to side with the reader who protests an unpleasant photograph and defends the bounds of good taste. But another — and to me, better — option is to understand that the problem is not one of too many unsettling images but of too few. When the tragedy or suffering of only certain people in certain places is made visible, the boundaries of good taste are not really transgressed at all. ‘‘We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,’’ La Rochefoucauld wrote. What is hard is being vividly immersed in our own pain. We ought to see what actually happens to American bodies in situations of war or mass violence, whether at the moment they happen, as Broomberg and Chanarin show us, or in the wake of the violence, as presented in van Agtmael’s book. We must not turn away from what that kind of suffering looks like when visited on ‘‘us.’’ Photojournalism relating to war, prejudice, hatred and violence pursues a blinkered neutrality at the expense of real fairness. All too often in our media, the words take us all the way there, but the photographs, habituated to a certain safety, hold back.