This paper focuses on the 2023-2024 Israel-Hamas war as its primary case study and explores the impact of violent war imagery on social media on viewers’ affective and ethical responses to distant conflict. Digital cameras and platforms such as TikTok and X are closing the gap between the battlefield and the audience, changing the experience of witnessing state violence. Images become not just documentation but weapons of war, persuasion, and emotional mobilisation. The study draws upon Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, Roland Barthes on photography, Freud’s “beating fantasy,” and Hoffman’s theory of cognitively mediated emotion to examine how the dual response—an innate empathy and an inherent voyeurism—that violent imagery provokes influences moral judgement. From nineteenth-century battlefield photography to televised coverage of the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, and the current “cyberwar,” it traces the medium’s historical development and places today’s image culture in a larger genealogy of mediated suffering. The article then takes up the controversial question whether atrocities should be shown, discussing Thomas Hirschhorn’s demand to confront pictures of dead bodies and Georges Didi-Huberman’s defence of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando photos. Finally, it examines the potential of artistic reframing in the works of Martha Rosler, Christian Boltanski and Alexandra Rose Howland to prevent atrocity imagery from sliding into aesthetic fatigue and cultural consumption. The paper argues that in the context of today’s visual culture, the interpretation of violent images is necessarily a moral and political act that requires a rethinking of how we understand the suffering of others.

Authors:
Kun Chien Lin, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

About the Presenter(s)
Mr. Lin Kun Chien is currently a Project Assistant for an English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) programme at the College of Management, Chang Gung University, Taiwan, a Ministry of Education grant-funded initiative supporting bilingual education.

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