When I see the photograph of Donald Trump holding a fist in the air on Inauguration Day, I think first of Twitter. By the time the photo arrived on my feed, it was already encrusted with commentary from people racing to ascribe meaning to the first moments of the Trump presidency. First: Was he doing … the Black Power salute? And if so, what did that mean? Was he clueless? Racist? Or funny? To those who heralded our new president as the ultimate political jester, the pose was a triumph. To others, it was a menacing taunt to his predecessor: Look what my whiteness allows me to get away with.



In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin wrote that the ability to mass-produce art meant that photographs could now “meet the beholder halfway.” The newspaper allowed news photography to arrive right at our doorsteps — the fastest we could see the world photographers had captured. But on the internet, it feels as if images have the power to storm into our consciousness and start rearranging the furniture. They arrive as horrifying affronts and shimmering diversions that seem capable of remolding our thought processes and reformatting our memories.

If photographs used to be packaged only in a carefully digestible form, to peruse over breakfast or tuck into a briefcase, they now arrive in a streaming glut that can never fully be consumed. We are confronted with the never-ending task of bearing witness. Images of disaster unfolding in faraway lands arrive faster than we can figure out how to pronounce the conflict’s name or spell it from memory.

Calamities of so many different kinds and degrees — Puerto Ricans wading through hurricane waters, a burned-out California trailer park, people fleeing gunfire at a country music concert and the tortoise Lonesome George, the final known member of his species, who died in 2012, returned home to the Galápagos Islands and put on display — pile up alongside apocalyptic jokes from first-world social media celebrities, because LOL the world is ending and nothing matters. It’s appalling and flattening at once. Every caress of an iPhone screen could serve up an image of a stranded refugee or a video of a chipmunk clinging to a confused house cat. The same thing that pulls us into tragedy soothes us through distraction.

And still, photography holds the power to clarify. The so-called alt-right once seemed abstracted in its online alcoves, where white supremacists hide behind anonymous frog avatars. In Charlottesville, Va., in August, we finally looked them in the face — young white men dressed in the corporate uniform of white polo shirt tucked into sad khakis, sullying the reputation of the Tiki torch. The portraits of teenage Nigerian girls who made brave escapes from Boko Haram — their faces covered with veils, flowers or their own hands to protect their identities — are a stunning testimony to heroism in the face of unspeakable violence.

It’s a cliché to remark, at the end of the year, that the time has moved quickly and slowly all at once. But one of the dark powers of our devices is to bend time, to suck us into the screen and spit us out seemingly months later. It can sometimes feel as if the only thing that exists is the one that’s being talked about online right now. To study these photographs is to be perpetually surprised at what has just happened: The last mass shooting before the last mass shooting before the last mass shooting; the hurricane before the flood before the fires. It seems impossible, looking back at a photograph from President Trump’s inauguration, that Barack Obama was actually president of the United States earlier this year.

We can still clip out newspaper images we want to remember and press them in albums. But today, while every photograph we have ever seen feels instantly accessible at any moment, we also rarely recall them. To pause and look back is a revelation.

— AMANDA HESS