On: Tales, Images, and Unexplored Contexts
This article is best enjoyed whilst listening to the song “Truth" by Alex Ebert - https://youtu.be/_62hfITLlU0
The Philosopher, Susan Sontag, wrote a book about photography that is as nuanced as one might never expect a book on images to be. And having listened recently to an episode on a podcast called “Philosophize This!” that detailed the content of this book, I have come to believe that she might have just been spot on with her take on images —and by extension to our modern-day world: screenshots.
Susan Sontag believes that pictures or images take something complex —in her philosophical instance, the human experience— and reduces it into a two-dimensional take that often never tells the whole story. This might seem quite rudimentary, yet it highlights how often we have come to forget that an image is usually only a stripped-down representation of a thing and not the reality of it. Being bombarded with images, whether moving pictures or portraits, we have somehow lost our ability to invoke the power of nuance and context to a lot of the images we view or consume.
A Tale of Two Screenshots
In the early hours of June 1st, 2023, Twitter user @_Hydonni quoted a tweet about posting a screenshot of conversations with parents. The screenshots she posted (which I am not reposting here) showed her, obliviously, religious father, pleading with her —and I am paraphrasing here— to stop posting lewd pictures online, which she was wont of doing, and he then proceeded to send her scripture posts or religious texts before concluding by sending what, to most, appeared to be loving words of encouragement and pleas for repentance. The lady in question, in response, proceeded with replying to her father's messages berating him for not caring or asking about her well-being but instead being judgmental towards her choice of what she chose to do with her body. The first screenshot was mostly of her father's messages. The second was predominantly hers. And by the early hours of the morning, like most things on Twitter, this tweet caught on fire —proverbially.
Now the virality of the tweet wasn’t my concern. I recalled seeing this when she had initially made the tweet and immediately thinking “Yeah, Nigerians are going to have a field day with this as soon as they wake up.” It had all the elements of what these days people on Twitter streets refer to as “banger” posts: something with enough controversy to rock the boat of the average Nigerian's sense of morality. And nothing says amoral to the typical Nigerian than the appearance of blatant disrespect for one’s parents. In our heads, these heroes can do virtually no wrong. And even if they did do wrong, there is an unwritten rule that because their generation was different from their kids, they should be cut some slack. Often this “slack cutting” is never extended both ways. But that’s me digressing. Because the real reason why I am saying all of these is that despite my initial brushing off of the tweet, waking up to the many takes and pontification that has been doled out, I have come to appreciate how profound Susan Sontag’s take on photography now appears.
But first off, I should start by stating, unequivocally, that I empathize with @_Hydonni and more so, I understand how she feels. Not because I’ve felt that way about my parents, but because I know how reductive images are —when void of any true context or nuance.
A Tale of the Prince’s Middle Finger
Honestly, nothing feels less hurtful than capturing a moment and discovering that such a frozen moment has been inadvertently stripped of so much context from the experience. In a world where we all know how images can easily be manipulated, it’s funny how much we still tend to be trusting of them. In this regard, I am reminded of the famous Prince William’s picture where in one image he appears to be flipping the crowd off. It was a hilarious image and I remember loads of people understanding just how unfortunate it was that we could see one thing one way and without context or an opinion that differs, we could largely misinterpret it. Taken at face value, that image of Prince Williams would have likely driven most people mad. It’s crazy to think that even if —and I say this based on absolute conjecture— the actual image didn’t turn out to be some optical illusion, a lot of people would have still been lost in the context of his apparent flipping off. Couldn’t it have been possible that he was flipping off one of his closest mates who he spotted in the crowd; and in a weird boyish way, flipping each other off was their way of being playful and chummy? But again, I digress.
Nevertheless, the Prince William-esque situation is how I have come to feel about images. It’s the fact that we tend to forget that so much context is stripped off when we only take images and tend to only evaluate their nuance at face value. Especially those sorts of images that come with some emotional heft. Images are incredibly empowering and yet they can be reductive if used to replace or placate reality. And it is understandable that how we perceive images will solely be based on our preconceived notions. But, I believe that images that aren’t ours —where we aren’t the object of focus for the lens— are supposed to be taken with a grain of salt and/or a dose of empathy.
A Tale of the Parent Trap
I have an amazing relationship with my parents, at least from my perspective. And I know how much it can sometimes feel like you owe them your life. But I also know that there’s nothing more easily manipulated than this same feeling. I also know that no matter how much my parents are heroes in my eyes, I am self-aware enough to know that most times I wear rose-tinted glasses when I evaluate their misgivings. In essence, I think more people need to understand that their amazing relationship with their parents is just that: theirs! It is in no way indicative of how another person’s relationship with theirs should be. Yes, you are certain that you would never, in a million years, air out your parent's shortcomings online to strangers, but that does not invalidate the experiences of someone who chooses to. Neither does it make you more morally astute than they are.
And deep down some of these things are simple truisms. They are not things we do not inherently know. But sadly, we live in a society —Nigeria, in this case— where we get a kick from how heightened we can be about our morality especially when it’s projected on others. It’s often, I suspect, a coping mechanism. We pat ourselves on the back for being good kids to our parents despite the underlying trauma we may have faced thanks to them. And in doing so, we feel justified to say to another person “You’re a terrible kid. Can’t you just be like me and cut these people some slack? They did not know any better.” As ennobling as that sentiment might seem, the truth is that we have no right to do so. Yet, we do it so often it has become a part of our default reaction to tweets like @_Hydonni’s. And deep down I think it has little to do with actual human decency and more to do with the fact that we know such reactions would be wildly touted as “right.”
A Tale of Neither Right or Wrong
These days we have more discussions that feel so polarized it would appear as though there are only two sides to anything: right and wrong. And just as images are reductive in their simplification of the complex human experience, I think the polarizing idea of right and wrong is equally the same. In cases such as @_Hydonni's tweet, most people know they’d always appear to be on the “right” side when we take the screenshot images at face value and speak to what is usually our first societal instinct about parents. It is always going to be a case of “She’s wrong” vs “He’s right”, especially when we have nothing in the way of context to go on. In cases like this, we do not contextualize the other person's experience, we simply hijack it. We make it our own and somehow find a way to claim to be more “aware” than others —including the person whose experience we are hijacking.
We forget that despite how we may feel about another person’s choices, it is ultimately going to be their choice. And sometimes whatever snapshot of their lives they choose to share with us online, more often than not, it never, ever tells the whole story.
Images are often so powerful they can distort how we perceive reality. We go on Instagram and are enamored by the glamour of other people’s lives captured in video clips and still images and somehow we lose sense of the fact that so much about what is real is lost when the cameras come out. And like in the case of @_Hydonni’s tweet, we take sides —wrong or right— and forget how most of what is real exists in the grey. And this is not to say there isn’t a possibility that what you perceive from an image might just be the reality of things. Indeed, sometimes, as they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” But the thing about that saying is that it fails to point out the fact that most times a thousand words never truly tell the whole story.
But I guess the point of this is not necessarily to pontificate (although I have done a lot of that here) but to remind people of how easily images can give us a false glimpse into the reality of others that we haven’t lived or experienced. For @_Hydonni, her reality is one that no matter how many times you posit, you may never truly understand. Maybe her father means well like most people think or maybe in that screenshot captured, we get a rare glimpse into an instance where he appears to mean well. Maybe she, on the other hand, has never responded rudely before, and that captured screenshot moment was one of the rare occasions where she did so due to factors we might never truly understand. It all going to be a bunch of maybes and as far as I am concerned, we may never know the whole story. But we can know for sure that when it comes to images, there is always more to what we see in those captured and frozen moments than meets the eye.