Documentaries to watch/"Distant suffering"

“Two assumptions inform the focus on the ethics of images. The first is that images do not simply have a representational power in depicting an external reality but that they possess a performative power upon this reality, simultaneously constituting it in meaning. It follows that, rather than interpretation being concerned with the witness’s ‘spontaneous’ faculty of empathy, it emerges instead at the interface between the witness and the object of his or her gaze precisely through those texts that produce meaning about vulnerability and violence.

The second key assumption, it follows, is that our moral and...