Sublime

ambitions. Photojournalism furthers these ambitions to the extent that this cultural practice produces an ethnocentric gaze at social violence occurring “elsewhere.” Atrocity images often privilege a normative gaze that can be intentionally moralistic because they call for a judgment by the viewer

Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country is a quintessential modern experience, the cumulative offering by more than a century and a half’s worth of those professional, specialized tourists known as journalists.

” Levitt’s deadpan spunkiness emerges throughout the essay. She is a proud reporter, insisting on the exterior, matter-of-fact, impersonal quality of her work, writes Gopnik. But she refused to become a journalist. “A reporter,” according to Levitt, “says what she sees; a photojournalist sees what everyone else is saying.”