The opposite of sadness is not hope, but hope is what this picture I took this summer makes me feel, and it is the picture that came to my mind when I sat down to write. I don’t know why, other than another picture taken of a beach on the other side of the Mediterranean sea in a dramatically different situation was another reason to feel hope this week.
North and South, safety and stability on one side and the chaos brought about by conflicts on the other, families, friends, my boys enjoying a swim in the sea on a summer evening and migrants fleeing for their lives dying in that sea thousands of miles and a world away. Pictures can be terribly good at pulling at our emotions, or playing on them. They can also be terribly good at stirring us into positive action through those emotions, as was demonstrated last week with the picture of the little Syrian boy washed out dead on a Turkish beach. So this is the good news: that pictures still have incredible power, as acknowledged by no less than Nicolas Kristoff of The New York Times in a tweet on September 4th: “The impact of the photo of the drowned Syrian child underscores that photojournalism isn't secondary to journalism but at its very core.”
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