Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures)

those who “consume” the news can be corrected. There are powerful, almost incontrovertible, codes of decorum maintained by and for people who are thought of as White, or who have been invited to participate in Whiteness. The racial disparity in published photographs of traumatized bodies is by now a recurring, and almost tedious, question.

A filmic view of a landscape is not quite the same as a filmic view of a painting. The landscape is always charged with the possibility of usefulness. When you’re looking at a field, someone can always walk across that field. A painting, on the other hand, is settled. It is there to be looked at. It stills the frenzy of the human heart. It declares

Writing fiction often contains an element of self-hypnosis, of flying in the dark.

When we speak of “shooting” with a camera, we acknowledge the kinship of photography and violence.

newsworthiness rarely brings destroyed White bodies to the front page of the newspaper.

we were perhaps avoiding.

Certain images underscore an unbridgeable gap and a never-to-be-toppled hierarchy. When a group of people is judged to be “foreign,” it becomes far more likely that news organizations will run, for the consumption of their audiences, explicit, disturbing photographs of members of that group: starving children or bullet-riddled bodies. Meanwhile, th

These photographs, finally, are mirrors, not windows. We look into them, and what they reflect back to us is something monstrous and hard to reconcile with our notion of ourselves. We look, and look, and then—sated with looking, secure in our reactions, perennially missing the point—we put them away.

Imagination is delicate. It imposes decorum. A photograph insists on raw fact, and confronts us with what